Directed by Mariama Diallo, this film premiered at Sundance before selling to Shudder and premiering in March 2022.
Tropes:
- Ambition Is Evil: It's implied that Liv commits hate crimes against Jasmine and ultimately kills her in order to get tenure and thus secure her place in the college.
- But Not Too Black: Played for Drama. The oppressed Jasmine and Gail are both noticeably darker than Liv, who is very light-skinned, which is implied to be because she's actually white.
- Catapult Nightmare: Jasmine keeps having bad dreams and waking up like this.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The Amish woman that Gail sees while out walking. Who is heavily implied to be Liv's real mother.
- Defacement Insult: Jasmine finds the word "LEAVE" carved in the door of her dorm room and a noose hanging from the doorknob. The door is repainted and partially fixed but the words remain visible.
- Driven to Suicide: Jasmine. The ending does not make it clear if there were supernatural factors involved.
- Everything Is Racist: Liv teaches like this. One of Jasmine's first conflicts with her is when Liv assigns Jasmine to write a race-based analysis of some text, only to then fail Jasmine when the student argues that race isn't at all a factor in the text.
- Evil Plan: The theory that Liv killed Jasmine. This helped Liv in two ways: it buried the grade complaint Jasmine had filed against her, which was impeding her prospects for tenure, and it also put the college in a position where they were desperate to prove they weren't racist, which pressured the committee to grant her tenure. And it worked.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: Jasmine arrives to school wearing her hair in its natural texture. After having trouble fitting in in a mostly white campus, she starts to wear her hair straightened. Thanksgiving break arrives and with everybody gone, she goes back to her natural hairstyle.
- Freshman Fears:
- Jasmine has just entered the college as a freshman, and she's made miserable by oppression in the college, struggles to make friends, and to improve her grades, culminating in her potential suicide or supernaturally-influenced murder.
- Her roommate and fellow freshman Amelia is gang-raped in the woods and quits college as a result.
- Freudian Trio: Gail is the ego who tries to mediate between Jasmine and Liv. Liv appears to be the nice, if somewhat passive-aggressive, superego, while Jasmine is the more troubled, mentally unstable id. However, Liv and Jasmine deconstruct the implications of their places with the revelation that Liv has been hiding her true ethnicity, meaning that she lied to everybody and manipulated both Jasmine and Gail.
- Heroic BSoD: Gail visibly crosses it when she finds out that Liv is blackfishing, Jasmine died, and realizes that the college is corrupt and will never change.
- Hiding Your Heritage: Liv is probably a white woman pretending to be black.
- Intimidating White Presence: Jasmine gets flooded by white people chanting the N-word at a college party, and Gail struggles with being the Black master of a college where the upper echelons are almost all white, with multiple scenes showing her as the only Black person in the room. Liv is the ultimate example if, as is heavily implied, she's actually white but posing as black, given that she menaces Jasmine for making a complaint against her, and possibly kills her.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Diandra and the other faculty opposing Liv as a candidate for tenure. They claim their opinion is not based upon Liv being a Black woman, but on the fact that she does not have much of a publication record, unlike Gail who has two books under her belt.
- Lovecraft Country: A haunted, prestigious college in rural New England surrounded by an Amish settlement.
- Mammy: When Gail is unpacking to move in, she finds a mammy figurine under the kitchen sink. It just makes her shake her head.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's left ambiguous if Jasmine was killed by some supernatural force, or if Liv killed her (and caused the other hate crimes, such as the carvings on her door).
- Messy Maggots: Gail gets her portrait painted as it is traditional for the residence hall master. Later on, she opens a drawer and is horrified to see it's full of maggots. Even after arranging for fumigation, she finds that her portrait is infested, leading to a bunch of them spilling out of the portrait's mouth. This is her clue that there is something rotten going on at Ancaster.
- Mistaken for Racist: It's implied that Liv killed Jasmine and faked the other hate crimes against her to make the college look racist. That way the tenure committee would be pressured into granting Liv's application for fear of reinforcing the accusations of racism if they denied tenure to a black woman.
- Ripped from the Headlines : Liv, a white woman posing as African-American in an academic post and giving an actual black student a hard time for being insufficiently racially conscious blatantly invokes Rachel Dolezal
, - Profiling: By the end of the movie, a report of a "suspicious female" walking on the quad is heard over the college security radio. The "suspicious female" is Gail, who is just walking home.
- Stop Being Stereotypical: Both Liv and Jasmine object to each other in different ways. Jasmine finds Liv's insistence that Everything Is Racist grating and tiring, especially when she fails her essay for not being about race. Liv seems to think of Jasmine as along the lines of The Whitest Black Guy. It gets a twist with the revelation that Liv is probably white.
