[REVIEW] Nanny at Austin Film Festival
“I remember the night I found out. I walked to the beach. The moon was so big. The water was cold at my feet. I’m glad I didn’t do it. This one I would keep,” Senegalese immigrant Aisha (Anna Diop) waxes poetically of her first act of maternal love: choosing to keep her son Lamine after becoming pregnant. At the heart of Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny is Aisha’s desire to be reunited with her son, separated from her by an ocean and the increasingly frustrating obstacle of working as a nanny for an affluent white family to secure his passage. While Jusu recognizes that her debut’s blend of terse drama, psychological and supernatural horror, and the fantastical could lead to endless discussions of where it lands genre-wise, she argues that at its core, it is a story of the lengths a mother would go for their child when thrust into an environment that wasn’t intended to nurture nor support her.
Drawing from the experience of fearing for her own mother as she entered strangers’ homes to do various forms of domestic work, Jusu combines elements of West African folklore and the supernatural into Aisha's disturbing, ordinary life. Aisha is hired by Amy and Adam, an affluent white couple living in a high-end luxury apartment that they mysteriously can afford, to care for their daughter Rose. While Aisha instantly connects with Rose as the picky child finds comfort in eating the Senegalese meals Aisha prepares for her own lunches, she finds herself annoyed with the flirty Adam, and at total odds with Amy, who demands Aisha stay for unplanned overnights, console and comfort her with her work and marriage troubles, and stay quiet about unpaid wages. All under the ever-present eye of the nanny cam.
Nanny is a film whose authenticity lends to its effectiveness. While the film’s horrors are rooted in the horrifying assumption that Aisha exists for the family’s convenience, its psychological elements weave around Aisha after she reads to Rose about Anansi the Spider, a West African trickster figure. Another figure, Mami Wata, a water spirit known as La Sirene, is the emotional tether to Aisha’s son, constantly drawing our minds back to the body of water that separates Aisha from her family. While audiences have come to expect Westernized demons and ghosts in their supernatural stories, Jusu’s reliance on West African folklore as the foundation of her horror elements allows her to create an original and utterly effective horror film unlike anything I’ve seen.
Nanny’s strong script is bolstered by performances ranging from the emotional to absurd with Anna Diop (Titans) being the clear stand out. While the family’s other domestic help blends into the backgrounds as almost props to the family’s affluent lifestyle, Anna Diop plays Aisha as a woman who knows her worth and refuses to become invisible, and it is the cracking of Aisha’s strength that allows Diop to truly shine as she must fight for her and her son’s sake.
On speaking about the film, Nikyatu Jusu constantly alludes to the symbolic nature of water; both as a source of life and rebirth, as well as a dangerous, sweeping force. The narrative story possesses a current: one that at first seems small and inconvenient as Aisha settles into a new domestic role, but quickly sweeps her off her feet as the story becomes more terrifying and emotionally complex. The film’s horror and storytelling is greatly aided by its editing, which relies on a bombardment of moments quickly spliced together to reflect the constant battle of balancing the problems in Aisha’s familial life as well as those that are the result of her employment. From a craft standpoint, Nanny is a film whose narrative and thematic strengths are only further elevated by the artistry of its crew and how everything from the sound mixing to the editing contribute to making a film that is not only terrifying, but also has something to say about the laborers whose backs upper-class domestic life is built upon.
Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny begins a limited theatrical release on November 23rd, 2022, but if it isn’t showing in a theater near you, it can be streamed on Prime Video beginning on December 16th, 2022.