rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2022-09-17 12:05 pm
rachelmanija) wrote2022-09-17 12:05 pm
Master
This was my third favorite of the movies I saw at virtual Sundance. It's very strong up until the end, which leaves a lot of threads hanging.
Gail (Regina Hall) is appointed as the first Black master of an elite New England university. On the surface, she's welcomed; not very far at all beneath the surface, she's a curiosity appointed to a historically deeply racist college by a lot of white people patting themselves on the back so hard, they're about to seek care for back bruises and shoulder sprains.
While she's still trying to navigate this situation, a Black student accuses her of racism, and Black students become the target of racist attacks which may or may not be supernatural. Meanwhile, there are extremely fraught tenure hearings. Gail investigates, and learns very unsettling things about the college's racist past, which may be very literally still haunting it. A woman was hanged in the area hundreds of years ago for being a witch. Was she a witch, or an innocent victim of prejudice? Either way, could she still be haunting the campus?
The horror aspects are fantastic as horror and as sociopolitical commentary, but the last act fell apart for me - it worked on a metaphoric level but not on a plot level.
Toward the end, Gail's friend Liv, who has always said she's biracial, gets her racial identity questioned. She's either a white Rachel Dolezal type, or biracial but raised in an otherwise white cult. The truth is unknowable, to Gail and possibly even to Liv herself. If she really is biracial, then everything that rings false about her makes sense - it's her actual truth, but one she was only able to learn the same way an actual white woman would have had to learn it, from the outside in. This is a fascinating, meaty storyline that probably should have been introduced earlier.
The end doesn't resolve or answer very much at all. I wanted some sort of explanation of what the hell was actually going on with the witch, and whether there even was a witch. Maybe the witch is actually the spirit of white supremacy, and Margaret who was hanged was just an innocent woman - maybe even a Black woman - who was scapegoated in death as well as life. Maybe there is no witch, and the immortal white faculty gain powers by sacrificing a Black student every year. Or some such. I just wanted some explanation.
And if some of the faculty were immortal, how did that tie in on a non-metaphorical, WTF is going on level?
Master on Amazon Prime Video.
Gail (Regina Hall) is appointed as the first Black master of an elite New England university. On the surface, she's welcomed; not very far at all beneath the surface, she's a curiosity appointed to a historically deeply racist college by a lot of white people patting themselves on the back so hard, they're about to seek care for back bruises and shoulder sprains.
While she's still trying to navigate this situation, a Black student accuses her of racism, and Black students become the target of racist attacks which may or may not be supernatural. Meanwhile, there are extremely fraught tenure hearings. Gail investigates, and learns very unsettling things about the college's racist past, which may be very literally still haunting it. A woman was hanged in the area hundreds of years ago for being a witch. Was she a witch, or an innocent victim of prejudice? Either way, could she still be haunting the campus?
The horror aspects are fantastic as horror and as sociopolitical commentary, but the last act fell apart for me - it worked on a metaphoric level but not on a plot level.
Toward the end, Gail's friend Liv, who has always said she's biracial, gets her racial identity questioned. She's either a white Rachel Dolezal type, or biracial but raised in an otherwise white cult. The truth is unknowable, to Gail and possibly even to Liv herself. If she really is biracial, then everything that rings false about her makes sense - it's her actual truth, but one she was only able to learn the same way an actual white woman would have had to learn it, from the outside in. This is a fascinating, meaty storyline that probably should have been introduced earlier.
The end doesn't resolve or answer very much at all. I wanted some sort of explanation of what the hell was actually going on with the witch, and whether there even was a witch. Maybe the witch is actually the spirit of white supremacy, and Margaret who was hanged was just an innocent woman - maybe even a Black woman - who was scapegoated in death as well as life. Maybe there is no witch, and the immortal white faculty gain powers by sacrificing a Black student every year. Or some such. I just wanted some explanation.
And if some of the faculty were immortal, how did that tie in on a non-metaphorical, WTF is going on level?
Master on Amazon Prime Video.
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—ooh, after googling the movie, it turns out Amber Gray is in this (as Liv)! I've seen her twice in a live theater context (including, yes, the Soup Macbeth) so I'd be interested in seeing her act in a movie.
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I'm not sure that trying to do too much was the issue - it did need something to tie everything together, but no given individual strand was resolved either. I'd call it a third-act collapse, which is a common problem with horror.
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Unfortunate! It sounds really cool, overall.
(Not-so-fun fact: I actually did have a college professor who turned out to be a Rachel Dolezal type. That was... wild.)
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OMG! Details pls?
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I had her for a huge freshman-requirement World History class, which was actually my favorite class that semester, because it was framed around the 1600s-1700s in Pretty Much Everywhere But Europe rather than 1800-1900s in Europe (and U.S., and during the Cold War, China), which is what my high school World History class had focused on. I never had an actual conversation with her or anything; she would always beeline out of the room immediately after class and was never on campus otherwise. She also cancelled class a lot, and I actually got higher than 100% on my final exam for her class because she gave everyone extra credit because she didn't get us our midterms back until, literally, the week before the final. (At the time, she said she was dealing with [physical] health stuff and I remember feeling really worried about her; now I'm like, WHO KNOWS IF THAT WAS TRUE, because it turns out she was LYING ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE.)
Honestly the thing that is going to live rent-free in my head forever about this woman is the time that she made a comment in class about how "Drake pretends he's from the hood, but he's from Toronto." It was weird at the time but in retrospect I'm like, MA'AM????
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(apropos of nothing I AM from the Bronx and I know Toronto has a couple of neighborhoods that count.)
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- she knew Lin Manuel Miranda
- she was banned from the country of Angola
It's such a weird, awful situation - my college professor made international news for being Rachel Dolezal 2.0! - and I only ever had her for the one class; I can't imagine how much more of a betrayal it was for her colleagues, or students who saw her as a mentor.
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I knew a compulsive liar of that general sort. She claimed to have been a professional comedian who opened for Jim Carrey in Las Vegas, to have been a Marine who fought in Desert Storm, and to have cancer. (The last might have been true, but the first two weren't.) Thankfully she was unknown except in Los Angeles small theatre circles.
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WOW.
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Still, I love how ambitious and rich it is. I need to seek out some of the director's other work. And Hall is phenomenal.
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I had thought it was a first film!
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I don't even remember that part! That's how much was going on!
Yeah, it looks like it was her feature-length directorial debut, but it looks like she's directed some horror shorts plus a couple episodes of Random Acts of Flyness, which I haven't seen but which looks cool.
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That's it!