Black women struggle to survive the twisted realities of an Ivy League college in Master, writer-director Mariama Diallo’s spine-tingling feature debut.

Set at Ancaster, a hallowed New England institution that has yet to address its history of racial exploitation, Master juxtaposes the experiences of professor Gail Bishop (Regina Hall), the school’s first Black ‘house master,’ with those of a freshman, Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), and a fellow educator, Liv Beckman (Hadestown’s Amber Gray).

As the semester progresses, a campaign of targeted harassment against Jasmine escalates along with the feeling she’s being haunted by Ancaster. Navigating the school’s inner sanctum, Gail starts to feel similarly. Liv, meanwhile, prepares for her tenure review amid a racially charged academic dispute with Jasmine.

As audiences first discovered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where Master premiered in the US Dramatic Competition section, Diallo’s film blends genres and tones to destabilizing effect. When her characters press forward, Ancaster pushes back. The specter of racism is nowhere and everywhere, real and unreal, bending Master’s reality into a phantasmic other-realm.

Diallo describes Master as a “spooky drama,” but she’s equally taken with another framing: that of the film as a haunted-house story, a guided tour of institutional racism where multi-layered horrors lurk across campus and inside every interaction—unseen until, all of a sudden, they’re not. “I think that’s deliciously put,” she says, speaking by Zoom during Sundance. “One of the themes, or currents, of Master is looking and being looked at.”

Before making Master, Diallo was best known for her short films Hair Wolf and White Devil, as well as HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness, the avant-garde sketch-comedy series created by Terence Nance. In one of her segments for the show, “Bad Hair,” a Black woman’s hair comes alive and bristles at a hairstylist’s slight. Leaving the customer’s head and fighting with other “bad” hair outside, the hair ends up in prison on the basis of its “indignantly abrasive curl pattern.”

The seriocomic, stream-of-consciousness imagination of Random Acts is fiercely political yet aesthetically liberated—“less about literal logic and more about emotional logic, about what a certain combination of images can evoke in a viewer,” according to Diallo.

“As a creative ethos, one of the things that we talked about a lot—and that was important to Terence—is disrupting the more rational flow of traditional cinema and thinking about ways in which we can make interventions on that, that are actually more honest and more direct to the heart of what we’re talking about.”

Concealing dark truths about Ancaster, this uncanny atmosphere reflects the ingrained hostility of the white gaze, which feels omniscient to the Black women at the film’s center. “I consider Ancaster—the school itself, and the location, the buildings, the land—to be another character in the film, and an antagonist,” says Diallo. “And I wanted to convey its presence through the way that the camera would approach and interact with these women.”

Though Jordan Peele’s Get Out was Master’s “most direct predecessor,” Diallo was stylistically influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Mirroring the former, creeping Steadicam shots and dead-center compositions heighten the sense of dreadful inevitability that stalks Jasmine across campus. Informed by the latter, fragmented editing closes any remaining distance between conscious and subconscious reality, while Diallo’s vivid use of the color red suggests Ancaster’s hidden violence bleeding into view.

Jasmine and Gail resist the oppressive energies of the college, interrogating their surroundings to uncover what lies beneath. Jasmine is stalked as she researches the story of Louisa Weeks, her dorm room’s previous occupant and the first Black woman to attend Ancaster, who died there. Relocated to the creaking residence reserved for masters, Gail studies portraits of the school’s founders and finds maggots teeming in the canvas.

Master also depicts everyday microaggressions piling up on its characters, inflicting psychic damage. Jasmine’s bag is searched at the library, and other students leave a clump of her hair in the bathroom with a note that reads “disgusting.” When she dances at a party, white frat guys crowd in to rap along to “Mo Bamba,” her presence seized as permission. Gail is congratulated on her promotion by a colleague who calls her “Barack,” while Liv is eventually forced to defend her right to belong at Ancaster.

Other sequences are heightened in surreally telling ways. A glossy diversity video turns the university’s people of color into mouthpieces promising “radical inclusion.” In a haze, Jasmine takes a night-time campus tour that stops by her dormitory, where she inexplicably sees herself asleep in bed, as the guide proudly explains “that is a Black student” to the prospective students and parents, as if unveiling a zoo exhibit.

Diallo first started writing Master a few years after graduation, after running into the faculty member who’d been tasked with overseeing her residential college. Excitedly, and without considering other people in earshot, she greeted her former house ‘master’ by that honorific, as she had at school.

His visible discomfort got Diallo thinking: about how perplexing it was that a term so connoted with slavery had continued to serve her alma mater, and how easily she’d accepted it back then. (The title was eliminated in 2016, after student protests.) Having attended private schools in New York City prior to studying at Yale, Diallo had anticipated on some level what being Black on its campus might entail, but she’d still had to normalize too much.

“There’s a way in which, on one hand, I had been primed for all of the other baggage that comes along with being a Black woman in a predominantly white space,” says Diallo. “But also, at the same time, it’s not very much of an advantage to have a few decades more of trauma than somebody.”

Gail was the first character Diallo wrote for Master, and she recalls recognizing her from the start. “Some of the most supportive and influential women in my life have been Black women who live in that space, and I just so knew the story,” she explains. Diallo’s mother worked in academia before retiring, and she’d known Black women professors at Yale who struggled, like her, to maneuver within predominantly white institutions.

For Gail, becoming Ancaster’s first Black house master is a psychologically fraught experience that makes her reflect. Has she succeeded in dismantling any of the historically racist structures she’s given her life to? Or has her career merely given cover to Ancaster’s darkness? “On the one hand, Gail has attained this massive professional achievement that she has been reaching for,” says Diallo. “And then she gets it, and her reckoning over the course of the film is about what it is worth and, and how much she is willing to give in order to keep it.”

Ultimately, Diallo wanted Master to explore the complexities of race as a social construct on college campuses. “It’s not necessarily peculiar to academia, but I do think that it is very potent there, this abstract concept of race as a tool or a weapon,” she explains. “Often, in spaces like that, identity is really in service to other motivations, and it can become turned on you—or if you’re canny, you might be able to find a way to turn it around.”

That’s certainly more the case for Gail than Jasmine, and for Liv more than either. “When you’re in a space that perceives a selfish gain to your identity, you can get caught in a strange place of self-exploitation,” Diallo says. Liv is all too willing to sell herself to succeed at Ancaster, prepared to present herself in a specific way that often allows others to project onto her what they want to see. “She’s the kind of person who’s not necessarily entirely upfront, somebody who does not walk straight,” teases Diallo.

Diallo also welcomes comparisons between Master and Get Out, though she’s more skeptical of terms like social and elevated horror, which strike her as redundant. “It’s like, how dull!” she laughs, shaking her head. “What a way to take the fun out of horror, to make it into social studies or something, as if this is like a high-school classroom. Like, can we live?”

To this point, another more recent favorite is Ari Aster’s Hereditary. “It’s not a horror film just for the sake of being a horror film,” says Diallo. “What’s also so deeply resonant about it is the way that it examines questions of shared and generational trauma: families, genetics, mental illness.”

This is closer to her design with Master, a horror movie that frightens not through jump-scares or bloodbaths but by letting its ambiguities linger alongside a visceral unease that speaks more accurately to the questions she’s asking: of race, psychology, self-image, and whether it’s even worth reforming institutions too predicated upon prestige to recognize the rot in their foundations.