Not only did this year’s Sundance Film Festival see a large number of horror films, but it’s a pleasant surprise to see just how many creative liberties filmmakers have taken with horror. The genre is enjoying a blend of scares with real sobering commentary about the world today. With Master and Resurrection, there is plenty to talk about.
Master (Mariama Diallo)
Horror comes in many different forms. Sometimes it’s a ghost. Sometimes it’s an urban myth. And sometimes it’s a chokehold people maintain over an institution. Writer/director Mariama Diallo juggles all of these elements together in Master, a spooky and deeply troubling portrait of academic racism that is part Get Out and part Candyman.
Taking place at an Ivy League-like university built on a site haunted by its Salem-era past, the story centers around three very different women who all struggle to belong. Gail (Regina Hall) has become the first Black dean of the school – named the “Master” – and begins to unravel how her face and her Blackness may be something that is just used and exploited in the name of “diversity and inclusion.” Meanwhile, her friend and fellow literature professor Liv (Amber Gray), often disagrees and collides with the faculty and her students on plenty of socio-political issues. One of these students is Jasmine (Zoe Renee), a first-year whose excitement for a brave new world is muddled by unwelcoming classmates and an urban myth that the spirit of a witch haunts the campus and would take a student’s life every year.
To all these women of color, moving into this new home comes with a looming sense of dread, like a foreboding warning that’s being whispered by past victims. Diallo does her best in balancing when she wants Master to lean into its political commentaries as a drama and when to flip the visual aesthetic over its head to give you a proper horror jumpscare. With wonderful use of color and stark lighting, a few shots in Master would bring back memories of Suspiria and the giallo horror subgenre. Certainly, you will find yourself unwittingly spooked.
On a writing level, though, the film occasionally loses its cohesiveness, being a story that wants to be both a searing drama and a supernatural horror movie and the two don’t always click together perfectly. The last ten minutes, when Gail makes some startling discoveries, is more frightening than any other attempted scare in the film. Part of me certainly wishes Master leaned more into the socio-political drama aspect of its story and steered away from witches.
That being said, Hall and Renee lead a fantastic pair of performances that capture the microaggressions women of color experience day by day, all while being pressured to be an example of Black excellence. Most of all, this is a film that takes chances and makes swings. It’s full of sophisticated and troubling ideas that make for an important conversation long after it’s over.
Master premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2022. It will premiere globally on Prime Video on March 18, 2022.
Resurrection (Andrew Semans)
Just how far can a lead performance carry your script? For Resurrection, Rebecca Hall might have just carried it to the finish line. It’s a disturbing, emotionally exhausting thriller whose head-scratching moments are rivaled by just how fantastic every actor is in this cast.
Writer/director Andrew Semans isn’t concerned about explaining what’s real. His film lives completely in Margaret’s (Hall) headspace, which becomes severely disrupted when the sinister David (a really unsettling and punchable Tim Roth), a monster from her past, suddenly returns. Told in a similar style as last year’s The Night House – which also sees Hall giving a staggering performance – Resurrection is more than happy to keep you in the dark about just what’s really going on. You’re never quite sure if a line of dialogue spoken by Margaret or David is supposed to be taken literally or metaphorically. Semans blurs that line consistently, all the way to the ambiguous ending. Though the finale is certainly the kind of insane, unhinged filmmaking that would excite fans of Ari Aster and David Cronenberg, I’m still scratching my head on what it all thematically means and just how much substance is there underneath.
However, the moving pieces that do work in Resurrection clearly shine. Hall continues her quest in showing us she’s willing to push her entire body and psyche to the limit. With her, Margaret takes a violent tumble down the rabbit hole. Anchoring her is a pair of young women who, in their own respective ways, remind Margaret of her younger self. The first is her daughter Abbie (an equally fantastic Grace Kaufman), whose initial teenage angst and self-isolation slowly transform into genuine concern for her mother’s health. The second is Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone), a young intern who works for Margaret and on the side receives personal relationship advice that is clearly similar to Margaret’s own past. Interestingly enough, it is the intern who Margaret can confess her past trauma to, instead of her own daughter. With Semans holding the camera on Hall for an eight-minute uninterrupted take, Hall’s command of your attention is so palpable that you can forgive just how big of an exposition dump her monologue is.
Though it might be a little too vague for its own good, Resurrection is a nail-biting descent into psychological hell. It proves once again that Rebecca Hall is one of the best actresses working today, and it showcases Semans as a demented talent to look out for behind the camera.
Resurrection premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2022. It will eventually be released in theaters and VOD by IFC Films.
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