Critic Reviews

With a stellar cast and inspired direction, Master is a thrilling and potent horror story about academia that has made its impact.

Diallo, an inspired stylist with bold things to say, strikes the balance between thrills and ills in a way that's wholly her own.

Detailed and deliberate, assertive but rarely obvious, Diallo’s Master is a towering, inventive shot in the arm for Black horror.

Diallo has crafted an incisive, intelligent, and stridently political horror film that is distinctly all her own. The terror at the heart of this film reverberates far beyond the myths of this academic institution. Master excavates the very roots of our country’s foundation and dares us to face the haunted ground on which it is built.

Diallo has a lot of things to say here. Yet sometimes words aren’t enough: a straight-up drama won’t bring audiences to the place where Diallo wants to take them. Rest assured she makes her points crystal clear within the genre trappings: the only question left is where next for this talented new director.

Master builds up to one of the most emotionally explosive horror finales I have seen in a while.

With a layered performance by Regina Hall as the university’s first Black dean of students, the film plays with familiar tropes and images from American horror, but re-fashions them into an unexpected, subdued story with a chilling emotional payoff.

Not all of Diallo’s thematic queries land, and at times, she weakens her ideas by over-explaining them. Nevertheless, her fearless interrogation resonates like a penetrating scream you can’t unhear.

Master is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth.

Well-performed, especially by Regina Hall, and directed with real flair and intention by Mariama Diallo, Master transcends its two-dimensional opening to become a complex, character-driven horror with much on its mind.