Nanny Movie Review

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Nikyatu Jusu’s feature film debut, “Nanny,” is compelling and a visual champ.

The story is about immigrant Aisha (Anna Diop), who has moved from Senegal to make a better life for herself and her son Lamine (Jahleel Kamara) in America. Lamine stayed behind, while Aisha moved in with her aunt in New York and started working as a Nanny for a white family. Amy (Michelle Monaghan), who hired Aisha, is indifferent to the needs of a nanny. Still, she appears to be someone Aisha can worth with. Her husband, Adam (Morgan Spector), isn’t there often; when he is, he’s mostly checked out. Aisha begins caring for Rose (Rose Decker), their five-year-old daughter, who she has been warned can be somewhat troublesome. She likes Rose and Rose accepts her right away. One reason is that Aisha gives Rose bites of her lunch. Amy insists on bland food, but Rose is now discovering food has a taste, and it’s good. Aisha also teaches her young charge French; something Rose excels at almost immediately.

Rose has to deal with her parent’s constant bickering back and forth, another reason to give the child a reason to cling to her new friend. It doesn’t seem her parents’ relationship will make it another day, but Rose hopes that doesn’t mean the end of Aisha in any way.

It’s difficult for Aisha to collect her pay from the stingy Amy, but when she gets her money, it all goes toward saving to bring her child to her. In the interim, she meets Malik (Sinqua Walls), who also has a child. Theirs is building into a lovely relationship, so he introduces her to his grandmother Kathleen (Leslie Uggams), who’s a medium. It’s around here that Aisha tells Rose some bedtime stories. She tells her about Anansi and Mami Wata from African folklore. This isn’t for the benefit of Rose, of course. Though she isn’t frightened, she absorbs the information. But, they’re being told to her for the audience’s benefit to tell us who these characters are and what they have to do with the rest of the tale. Aisha teaches the child that Anansi is a spider, a famous trickster from West African mythology. Through her discussions with Kathleen, we are told more about the water spirit, Mami Wata. She is often thought to appear as a mermaid. The spirit appears in a scene where she is most helpful, but the sight of her is strange and unwanted.

Director Nikyatu Jusu knows how to jar you and knows what it takes to make you uncomfortable. She uses darkness and the unknown as ways to keep you on edge, so the mystery element is soundly used. However, a horror this is not. It’s a creepy, dramatic thriller only because you’re trying to make it one. The narrative rides on a sense of foreboding because we’re determined to find it. Set aside the spiders, the mold and the water scenes and see it as a gorgeously shot tragedy, and that’s what you’ll see. I recommend watching this on the big screen.

I’d like to see Jusu and Diop work with Blumhouse again. It’s nice to see the production company do more than straight-up horror, proving with this that Jason Blum knows an arthouse winner when he sees one. Not hard to do when it’s shot by Rina Yang (Becoming), who knows how to pull beauty from the darkness.