The poster for Nanny creates the sense of a really particular, very acquainted sort of movie by way of an excessive close-up on the face of Aisha, its lead. She appears distressed, her options nonetheless recognizable however frivolously distorted by smears that appear like runny paint or dripping water. It’s simple to image this picture accompanied by discordant music that mines pressure and dread out of the stillness, supplementing a narrative about how this lady comes undone due to the issues she’s seen. The poster advertises that Nanny is being launched by Blumhouse, a studio primarily recognized for high-concept horror. The tagline is “We’re haunted by what we depart behind.”
All these hints that Nanny is a horror film aren’t false promoting: Author-director Nikyatu Jusu consciously makes use of the trimmings of recent horror to form the story. However she’s visibly much less involved with serving jumps and jolts to the viewers than she is in crafting a resonant drama. Jusu paints a wealthy portrait of Aisha’s life as an undocumented Senegalese immigrant and nanny below the thumb of a rich white household, however the horror parts meant to visualise her inner struggles by no means fairly cohere.
Immediately, the movie gives up a way of the stiff dynamic between nanny Aisha (Anna Diop) and her employer, Amy (Michelle Monaghan). The digicam frames each of them from a distance in an unbroken shot, as Amy arms Aisha a giant binder of tips, contact info, meal plans, and extra. Amy isn’t precisely unfriendly, however the digicam place creates a way of take away, chilling no matter heat she’s attempting to current. It’s nothing terrible — a considerably showy first impression, an air of entitlement. However Amy then steps throughout that skilled boundary by asking for a hug. Aisha is briefly shocked, however she obliges her boss. Amy doesn’t current the request like a requirement, however she doesn’t must; Aisha was employed to look after Amy’s younger daughter, Rose (Rose Decker), however she’s hardly able to disclaim the girl in command of her pay — particularly on her first day of labor.
Photograph: Prime Video
Aisha dutifully information her hours and places the receipts in Amy’s binder, although her cost is in money and in any other case off the books. She’s cheaper than a documented nanny, and he or she’s hardly oblivious to the state of affairs; as an undocumented former schoolteacher, that is merely the perfect avenue she will be able to discover for her skillset. Aisha wants the cash — she’s hoping to deliver her younger son, Lamine, over from Senegal. His absence weighs closely on her, and is made worse by her occupation: Whereas she bonds with, cares for, and usually lavishes consideration on Rose, her personal son is an ocean away. Aisha’s relationship with Lamine is completely by way of her cellphone, in both garbled video chats or recordings of the moments she missed.
Aisha’s guilt over leaving her son behind manifests in unusual visions. Rain pours down indoors. A distant determine stands at a distance in a lake. Spider legs solid an extended shadow that unfurls like an open maw. Aisha is ready to determine a few of the imagery, telling Rose tales about Anansi the spider, and the way his small measurement requires him to leverage his crafty to outlive. When speaking with an older lady (Deadpool’s Leslie Uggams) who’s extra versed within the supernatural, she learns that Anansi and the mermaid-like water spirit Mami Wata try to speak one thing to her. Aisha is fluent in a number of languages, and instructing them to Rose is a part of her job. However no matter these legendary figures try to inform her is a thriller.
Hallucinations and time loss tied up in guilt and/or trauma is commonplace territory for folks freaking out in arthouse motion pictures. By now, a yr with out one or two cinematic descendants of The Babadook would really feel incomplete. However Nanny stands aside for its imagery, realized with unusual talent and grown out of folkloric roots far faraway from different movies’ standard-issue terrors of shadowy entities pounding on the wall. Whereas Aisha’s visions unsettle her, and are supposed to unsettle viewers by affiliation, they’re subdued and lovely in the best way they bathe her in ethereal mild. There’s a way that the visions may not be so unsettling in any case, if she may solely determine what they imply.
Photograph: Prime Video
The place one other movie might need targeted solely on Aisha’s ache and psychological unraveling, Jusu takes care to indicate her protagonist attempting to stay her life and wrest again some management. She vents to a buddy about Lamine’s absent father, and strikes up a romance with the constructing’s hunky doorman (Sinqua Partitions), who has a toddler of his personal. She speaks up for herself when her employers neglect to pay her and unpaid time beyond regulation begins to pile up. Amy’s husband, Adam (Morgan Spector), says he’ll “advance” Aisha the cost, and he or she quietly however firmly corrects him: It’s not an advance if it’s what she’s already owed.
Jusu excels at highlighting the uncomfortable energy dynamics at work, permitting Aisha’s relationship together with her employers to be tense and complicated reasonably than teetering into overtly sinister territory. There’s no malice in the best way they deal with Aisha, however her discomfort on the liberties they take and the bounds they overstep is at all times palpable. Amy lends Aisha a gown at one level, insistent that it fits her pores and skin, whilst Aisha remarks that it’s a bit tight. Adam’s pictures adorns the house in large, blown-up prints, and he’s keen to speak with Aisha in regards to the topics of his artwork and his fame: Black poverty and strife. These interactions superficially recall the awkward “meet the household” moments of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, however the fact of them is cleverly mundane: Her employers really feel so comfortably above her that they don’t have to think about her interiority in any respect.
This dynamic is so effectively executed, in truth, that it’s curious that Jusu even bothered to dabble in horror, given how a lot much less efficient it’s than the drama. Aisha’s creepy visions are the weakest a part of the movie, constructing to an abrupt finish whereas elevating a recurring query: Will an viewers solely sit nonetheless to look at the social perils of a Senegalese immigrant in the event that they’re promised a couple of stretches of fearful apartment-wandering in between?
Horror turns into a storytelling crutch when it’s used this manner, as if it’s the one technique to purge the everyday happily-ever-after expectations of a extra typical movie. The Oscar-bait model of Nanny is as simple to image because the scary one urged by the poster, maybe retaining Diop’s nuanced lead efficiency, however smothering it in weepy speeches and a theme of advantage rewarded, the place onerous work pays off and the imply characters both see the error of their methods or get what’s coming to them. Horror could really be the one storytelling mode that reliably primes the viewers for this pessimistic model of the story, however Jusu’s in any other case spectacular work suffers when she divides its focus and hides its clearest concepts below style distractions.
Nanny debuts in theaters on Nov. 23 and can stream on Prime Video on Dec. 16.
