Amazon’s horror movie Master pairs a smart racial-politics story with relentless scares

polygon.com:

The Polygon team is reporting in from the all-virtual grounds of the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival, with a look at the next wave of upcoming independent releases in sci-fi, horror, and documentary film.

Allegorical horror has become a popular genre with filmmakers from marginalized groups, and it’s easy to understand why: Horror stories can make difficult topics more approachable, and they find funding and audiences more easily than just about any other genre right now. Emotionally and stylistically, they’re also a perfect canvas for expressing rage and fear. But they’re difficult to get right tonally. If the horror imagery is linked too neatly to the themes, they can come off as rigid and didactic. If the association is too loose, the horror elements can end up looking like grisly set-dressing on a social-issue drama.

Master, the arresting debut feature from writer-director Mariama Diallo, walks this line with confidence, if not quite precision. It’s a tale of racism and exclusion at an Ivy League college, but it’s also a story about a good old-fashioned New England witch haunting. The two strands are tightly intertwined and suggestive of each other, but Diallo makes the connection between them opaque, sometimes to frustrating degrees. The tense, unsettling mood is consistent through every minute of the film. The hauntings are scary, but the microaggressions and twisted racial politics that turn every conversation into a minefield are scarier still.

Master follows two Black women navigating a new academic year at the fictional Ancaster College. Jasmine (Zoe Renee) is a wide-eyed freshman student from faraway Tacoma, shy and coltish in her natural hair and plain clothes. Gail (Regina Hall) is an established