‘Master’ Ending, Explained: Breaking Down Regina Hall’s Confusing Thriller

If you caught Master on Amazon Prime this week, you might have been left scratching your head.

Written and directed by Mariama Diallo, this thriller starring Regina Hall first premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in January, and was released on Amazon Prime Video last Friday. The film is an eerie thriller about just how scary racism in elite academia can be. The story follows three Black women at a majority-white university: an incoming freshman, an up-and-coming English professor, and the university’s first-ever Black master of students.

The film has received mixed reviews from critics so far. Despite the strong cast and relevant theme, the tone of the movie is unstable, and the lore of the college is confusing. If you were lost, you certainly weren’t alone.

But never fear, because Decider is here to help. Read on for the Master (2022) plot summary and the Master ending, explained.

WHAT IS THE REGINA HALL MOVIE MASTER ABOUT? MASTER PLOT SUMMARY:

Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) is a newly-appointed master of an elite college in New England called Ancaster, becoming the first Black master in the school’s history.  She moves into the master’s living quarters, which are highly creepy and haunted by the memory of Black servants who used to work there.

Meanwhile, a Black freshman student named Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) moves into her dorm room with her white roommate Amelia (Talia Ryder). Their room, Room 302, is the same room that housed Ancaster’s first Black student, Louisa Weeks, who committed suicide in her dorm room in 1965. This is not to be confused with the legend of Margaret Millett, the so-called witch who—according to the sadistic upperclassmen trying to scare Jasmine— chooses a freshman every year to haunt until said freshman kills herself, at exactly 3:33.

Jasmine hangs out with Amelia and her friends, even though they are terrible to her, with microaggressions on top of microaggressions. She starts having nightmares and is just generally having a bad time. On top of that, Jasmine’s only Black professor, Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), gives her a bad grade on an assignment about race, and Jasmine believes she is targeting her on purpose. Jasmine files a dispute over the grade with Master Gail Bishop. At a committee meeting concerning Liv Beckman’s tenure, Gail—under pressure from her non-Black colleagues to assess the only Black professor “fairly”—mentions the grade dispute, and puts Liv’s tenure at risk.

Later, Jasmine discovers the word “LEAVE” carved into her door, and a noose hung on her doorknob. Master Bishop believes it to be a racist intimidation tactic. Jasmine’s nightmares start getting worse, and she wakes up with scratches on her neck. In the school archives, Jasmine finds the diary of the Black student who died in her room, and sees that she, too, was hearing strange noises at night and having bad dreams, which she believed was the witch haunting her. After an incident in the woods with some boys, Jasmine’s roommate Amelia leaves school.

Now completely isolated, Jasmine’s nightmares get worse. It’s hard to know what is real, and what is a nightmare—but the burning cross she finds on campus is real. When Liv’s tenure committee meeting goes awry, she goes off on the committee for allowing racist incidents to happen on campus.

Master Bishop sees the ghost of the Black servant who used to live in her house. Jasmine is scared by a cloaked figure on campus, and, when Master Bishop doesn’t respond to knocks on her door, Jasmine flees to her dorm and locks the door.  Someone is jiggling the handle, so Jasmine climbs out onto the building roof, slips, and falls, at exactly 3:33 a.m.

Jasmine wakes up in the hospital, with Master Bishop at her side, and tells Master Bishop the witch is haunting her, and that she doesn’t want to go back. Master Bishop tells Jasmine that she can’t quit. She says it is racism, not witches, that are haunting her, and she says Jasmine won’t be able to escape that anywhere. We never do find out who was jiggling Jasmine’s door.

WHAT IS THE MASTER ENDING EXPLAINED?

Taking Master Bishop’s words to heart, Jasmine goes back to school but is miserable. Master Bishop discovers Jasmine dead in her room, having hung herself.

Meanwhile, Liv’s tenure request is granted, and she tells Master Bishop she feels like she finally belongs somewhere. Liv lets slip she has a brother, and Master Bishop is surprised because Liv told her she was an only child. Liv replies that she doesn’t consider them her family anymore.

Master Bishop gets a phone call from an old white woman from the local Amish community, who Master Bishop has been suspicious of throughout the film. This white Amish woman, Esther, claims that Liv is her daughter and that Liv is a white woman pretending to be a Black woman. Esther shows Master Bishop a photo of Liv as a child and says that her father was white, too.

At a party for Liv’s tenure, Master Bishop accuses Liv of being a fraud and accuses the other professors of making themselves feel better about a Black student dying by giving a Black professor tenure. Gail realizes she is not the Master, but the maid, and that she failed Jasmine.

Liv tells Gail she is not a white woman, and that Esther raised her to believe that she would “go to Hell for being the bastard child of a Black man.” Liv insists that she told Gail the truth. Liv leaves the party by putting on her cloak—does this mean that she was the figure who scared Jasmine? The movie does not explain!

Gail leaves the party, and as she is walking home, she is approached by security and asked for her faculty ID. Gail tells the security officer that she doesn’t work at the school, and leaves the campus. With that, the movie ends.

It’s a tad convoluted, with questions left unanswered, but, the film seems to be saying there was never anything supernatural going on here—it was all the ghosts of racism past, present, and future.

Watch Master on Amazon Prime