LM23 Rating: So many excellent parts that didn’t quite add up
The genre of film that’s the hardest to please me is horror. I’ll give an easy pass for the latest Fast & Furious film and I’ll even tip my hat to Venom. But horror movies can only work if they’re scary. And not a lot on film scares me. I’ve been watching horror movies since I was in the single digits. I would envision scary scenes as I’m walking around my neighborhood and I would write my own scary stories. But the scariness of modern films has pretty much shifted from actual horror to obscene horror which is blood and body count.
This week, Regina Hall was a guest on The View and in addition to her Oscars hosting gig this weekend, she also promoted her new film, Master, which is streaming on Amazon Prime. Since Umma is not available in theatres here or on streaming, I was like so thrilled to be able to watch it.
The movie has so much promise. The premise is brilliant. The horror framework is set in the same ground breaking horror category that Jordan Peele has trailblazed in the last several years. It’s about the white patriarchal system and how people of color, in particular Black people, can be harmed by it. In Master, the system we’re confronted with is the New England elite university clique. Regina stars as Gail Bishop who starts her new job as a tenured professor. She arrives to her new home that sits on the campus, but she has trouble opening the front door. She’s on the phone trying to get help, until the door mysteriously unlocks and opens. Now this was when I thought, alright, I’m ready for the scary movie to begin!
Unfortunately, it just seemed like there were a lot of start-stop’s in the film just like this. Not only are we following Professor Bishop’s experience as the only Black and female tenured professor in a predominantly white university, but we’re introduced to a parallel character, a Black female student named Jasmine played by Zoe Renee. The film shifts gears where it becomes less about Professor Bishop’s creepy experiences in her home (that definitely needs more lights and bright pieces) to freshman Jasmine’s school experience.
Jasmine shares a small dorm room with another student named Amelia and we get to follow along as she navigates school life and living on her own, far from her home town of Tacoma, Washington. She of course casually mentions to her new friends that she is known to sleepwalk. But this revelation turns out to make no difference in the rest of the movie.
The supernatural seems incorporated into the school, New England ambiguously named Ancaster. The students are even known as the “Ancaster witches”. And everyone seems to know about the school’s folklore about bad things happening at exactly 3:33 a.m. and a woman who hanged herself at that time.
I thought this was a bit too much of telling rather than showing. At times it felt like we were at a Harry Potter school in that everyone’s in on the mysticism, but then it’s like, I thought this was supposed to be some elite university that’s like a Harvard or Cambridge? The school also happens to be in the same neighborhood as Amish or perhaps Mennonite villagers and everyone knows in a scary movie, people who live in the past are automatically creepy. That part wasn’t really told, but that was probably something that should’ve been explained to the audience.
The film then spends a long time building towards something, we don’t know. We think the scary part is going to be about this, but then it backtracks and goes down another path. Remember the door opening on its own at the start of the film? And there was some creepiness with maggots? Okay, so we forget about that because now we’re going to see what happens to Jasmine. I thought we were back on track when at one point in the film, Jasmine is asleep and what looks like a long reptilian claw, reaches out from underneath the bed and scratches her arm. The next day, Jasmine sees the marks from the scratches. Okay, we’re getting some momentum here. We have proof that there is a ghost lurking around campus!
But not so fast. The film spends a lot of time showing us the microaggressions and peculiar unfairness of what it’s like being a minority at an elite institution. Jasmine’s textbooks trigger the alarm at the library and so her backpack is searched. She tries to raise the point about a character being named Pearl is supposed to represent innocence as pearls are white, but her Black teacher totally ignores her and heaps praise on a white student. And you know trouble is going to happen when Jasmine goes to a dorm party and the white kids are all drunk and jacked up on something and partying too hard to some gangster rap-like song. But then that never really leads to anything.
Then at one point, Jasmine starts doing some sleuthing of her own and she’s of course in some dark corner of the library sifting through records in old school catalogs. Now, I can’t quite remember why or how she knew to do this research or even why. I also don’t know why these records are even available so many years later and in good reading condition at the library. If anything, you’d think the writings and ramblings of what could possibly be the ghost hand we saw earlier, would be hidden or thrown away.
More unnecessary information is given to us as nothing comes from that information. Jasmine for some reason lies to her mom that she’s been invited to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving dinner which is why she’s the only student sticking around campus for the holiday. Is there something wrong at home? What’s going on? We never know why…A fire starts with a cross and it just so happens that Professor Bishop is still hanging around campus along with Jasmine. Was this from the ghost? Is this an actual racist incident? We’ll never know why…
The film has many scenes that appear to be building up to either something scary in the supernatural sense or something scary in the real life sense. It’s like it can’t make up its mind which way it’s going so we keep getting pushed and pulled down so many paths. It would have been effective to blend the two together, but for some reason it felt like the two parts were always separate.
Jasmine inexplicably kills herself in her dorm and it’s even more inexplicable that it’s Professor Bishop who winds up at her door and finds her there. The relationship between Professor Bishop and Jasmine is also never really fully realized or explained. It’s not as if Jasmine was going to the professor to seek help or advice. The two never really share scenes together.
But then the movie takes an even weirder turn when it suddenly becomes about another Black professor named Liv, who is vying for the next tenured position. Liv is the professor who dismissed Jasmine’s remarks earlier, but she’s also Professor Bishop’s close friend at work as they are the only two Black women professors. Liv was clearly prejudiced against Jasmine, yet she uses the racial incidents and even Jasmine’s death to support her own ambition.
Remember those Amish people? So it seems like the creepy calls that Professor Bishop had been getting at the house are from a mother who claims her Elizabeth or “Liv” has been missing and she needs help finding her. Yes, the Liv this totally white Amish lady is talking about is the same Liv who Professor Bishop had been leaning on for emotional support ever since she started her new job.
I won’t even talk about the supposed scary parts with the ghostly faces and crying maids from the past as we don’t even get to understand what happened to them. The movie ends with Professor Bishop leaving the party to celebrate Liv’s tenure appointment and she tells a security guard that she doesn’t work at the university and asks which way to exit the campus. I actually thought she was going to be trapped or somehow never find her way out, but the movie ends as she's walking off campus.
I think the movie should have stuck with the ghostly past with the Black woman who killed herself. We had something going with the school’s dark past. The movie could have also focused more on Professor Bishop’s character and her experience as a tenured professor versus the student. We didn’t need the additional subplot of Liv maybe not being who she says she is.
The movie is trying really hard to tell us a million things, but we didn’t need to know about all of them as this is just one movie. Regina Hall and Zoe Renee were amazing in their roles as professor and student. But other than that, like many horror movies of today, this movie was another disappointment.
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