Master Ending & Real Meaning Explained | Screen Rant
Warning: Spoilers for Master below. It also briefly discusses suicide and racially-motivated hate crimes.
Mariame Diallo's film Master features an ambiguous ending that leaves several plot points seemingly unresolved. Released simultaneously in theaters and on Amazon Prime Video, Master is a thriller film with horror elements that comments on the struggles facing Black women in academia. But whereas many horror films lean more into explicit supernatural or suspenseful elements in their final acts, the last segment of Master instead pulls back from these concepts, offering a more mundane, and more brutal, explanation for the movie's events.
Master is set at Ancaster, a fictional elite liberal arts college in New England, and features three Black women trying to navigate a historically very white space at different levels of the academic hierarchy. Student Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) clashes with associate professor Liv Beckman (Amber Gray) over grades as well as a white student body that views her with suspicion. Tenured professor Gail Bishop, played by former Nine Perfect Strangers star Regina Hall, tries to protect Jasmine from an escalating series of racist hate incidents.
Jasmine's story ends tragically, with Gail finding the student hanging in her allegedly cursed dorm room, having presumably taken her own life. However, Master leaves unresolved who was directly responsible for the incidents that drove Jasmine to her death and whether it was really the ghost of hanged witch Margaret Millet, Jasmine's white classmates, or a manipulative Liv. This ambiguity allows Master's ending to more broadly critique the racial politics of the elite universities that are supposedly hotbeds of progressivism.
The biggest plot twist in Master's ending comes when Gail finally meets up with the mysterious hooded woman (Paige Rhea Allison) that she has seen around the campus. The woman claims that she is Liv's mother, and that Liv is actually white. The woman, who goes by the name Esther and wears clothes straight out of fellow "arthouse" horror The Witch, says that Liv was her daughter Elizabeth and ran away before passing herself off as a Black woman.
This twist taps into recent stories of racial impersonation. The most well-known such story is that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who claimed to be Black and even became the head of a local NAACP chapter, but there have also been a number of cases in academia of white people claiming to be Black or Indigenous and basing their academic work and public persona around these identities. In Master, this identity benefits Liv, who is able to attain tenure despite questions about her teaching and publication records due to a concern about diversity on campus. Master thus suggests that such racial impostors take advantage of schools' desires for an easy fix to diversity issues without resolving the challenges that face students like Jasmine, just as Hollywood whitewashing controversies continue despite a surface-level emphasis on diversity.
The reveal that Liv may have been adopting a fake Black identity also puts her actions throughout Master in a new light. She judges Jasmine's paper much more harshly than her white classmates for failing to engage with the essay topic of racial ideology in The Scarlet Letter. With her comment about "where you come from," Liv may have been pushing Jasmine to perform Blackness in the same way she does. Liv also takes advantage of the hate campaign against Jasmine to deflect questions from her tenure committee. It's even possible that Liv staged the racist symbols herself, although there is no direct evidence for this.
Liv offers an alternate explanation for Esther's story later in the movie, saying that her father was Black and that Esther is now either lying or has deluded herself about Liv's parentage. Liv is played by Underground Railroad star Amber Gray, a biracial actress, and her story is at least as credible as Esther's, leaving the character's true identity in doubt. This ambiguity, however, helps Master to make its point that academia encourages professors like Liv to perform a one-dimensional version of Black identity, no matter what the truth may be.
Master establishes early that there are legends of hauntings at Ancaster, most notably from Margaret Millett, an accused witch who was hanged nearby. In particular, Room 302, where Jasmine and her roommate Emilia are assigned, is said to be cursed. Louisa Weeks, the first Black woman to go to Ancaster, hanged herself in the room in the 1960s, and another undergraduate is said to have thrown herself out the window. In this way, these legends in Master tap into the same history of New England Puritanism as horror titles like Midnight Mass and Salem's Lot. Jasmine frequently sees visions of the witch and wakes up with unexplained scratches on her wrist. Gail also sees strange hooded figures around campus. Ultimately, Jasmine fulfills the legends, jumping from her room at the fabled time of 3:33 AM and ultimately hanging herself.
However, there is a non-supernatural explanation for everything that happens. Jasmine mentions that she frequently sleepwalks, which could account for her unexplained injuries along with her vivid dreams of a witch figure. The hooded figures on campus also seem to belong to the same religious group as Esther. Thus, Master still leaves some ambiguity as to whether there is a real ghost or witch.
This ambiguity ultimately serves to center the racial trauma that Master is really about. The most horrifying events that happen to Master's cast of characters are all grounded in real-life racial violence. This is a story about a young Black woman who has a noose hung from her door handle and a burning cross placed on her lawn, and in comparison to these reminders of real hate and violence, the supernatural aspect is secondary. The stories of witches and ghosts may or may not be real, but to Master, they are largely a red herring designed to make the audience unprepared for the more down-to-earth horrors they will encounter.
Master's ending also strongly suggests that Gail will be resigning from Ancaster College. In the final scene, she is confronted by a security guard on campus, who asks to see her faculty ID, another example of the suspicion that Master shows Black women are constantly under in elite spaces, in contrast to more fantastical series such as Bridgerton. Gail tells the guard that she doesn't work there, and is just heading home. Whether or not she has formally resigned, the scene suggests that Gail has given up on Ancaster being a home for her, or being able to meaningfully change the institution.
One thread running through Master shows Gail discovering symbols of Ancaster's racist past in the Master's house she moves into, from phrenological diagrams to a "mammy" food container. The school's inability to address a hate campaign against one of its students convinces Gail that despite its superficial embrace of diversity, Ancaster is unable to shed its history of white supremacy. Gail concludes, "I was never the master. I was just the maid, brought in to clean things up." Immediately before Master's ending, a clueless white colleague tells Gail "I'm not going anywhere," suggesting that the school is resistant to change. As in Get Out and other social horror films, Master argues that the only option is wholesale rejection of racist institutions.
Master's ending raises more questions than it answers. By the time the final credits role, the viewer is unsure of who was responsible for the hate crimes that led to Jasmine's death, what Liv's true identity is, and whether there were any supernatural events at all in this thriller film. By choosing a final act that largely consists of conversation and rumination, Master is designed to leave the audience thinking on the subjects it brings up instead of providing narrative satisfaction, mirroring other famous ambiguous endings like Inception.
Through its three main characters, Master suggests the double bind that Black academics find themselves in. In addition to having to deal with the overt and covert racism that Jasmine experiences, Master argues that Black women in academia must also deal with institutions pressuring them to constantly perform their identity, using them as powerless symbols of diversity, a danger suggested by Liv's storyline. Ultimately, Master raises the possibility that the only way to escape this bind is to do what Gail does at the end and walk away.