In ‘Nanny,’ Hell Is Nice White Parents
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Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (which opens in select theaters this week and debuts on Amazon Prime on December 16) has been described as a horror film, or at the very least horror-adjacent, but in truth the movie slips beyond easy categorization. There are horrors here, and more than a little dread. But its power owes just as much, if not more, to the material realities hemming its heroine in from all sides. Aisha, played by Anna Diop, is a recent immigrant from Dakar who’s taken on a new job as the nanny for a well-off white couple, Adam (Morgan Spector) and Amy (Michelle Monaghan). She’s doing this in part to send money home to her son, Lamine, who’s almost seven years old; the goal is to bring Lamine to the United States. In the meantime, she sees him everywhere. He is always on her mind. Brief Facetime calls — and the ensuing phone tag that results from distance and a time difference — are not enough.
Nanny is a movie about a world that does not make it easy for Aisha to reunite with her son, not only because she is an immigrant working at the behest of people more powerful than her, but because she is a Black woman, vulnerable to the optics, to her need for money, to the miniscule fissures of power and privilege that can define a life. Which is not to say that she lacks agency — if anything, Jusu is committed to complicating our expectations of what that might mean. The point is instead to dive into the muck of that complication. Nanny becomes a grave, spooky, watery nightmare, full of West African mythology and imagery, phenomena that cannot easily be explained. But before that, it settles into the defeating rhythms of Aisha’s job. The problem isn’t Rose (played by Rose Decker), the young girl in Aisha’s care, even though she is burdened with certain hypersensitivities, doesn’t like her parents’ healthy food, and already has a therapist. This isn’t a movie that reduces this child to being the problem or writes her difficulties off as the miniature injustices of a spoiled kid, just as it isn’t a movie about a nanny who sees the child in her care as a surrogate for her own child. The problem — rather, one of the problems — is Rose’s parents.
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Adam and Amy neatly fit the archetype of Nice White Parents: privileged but almost uneasy about it, dependent on a nanny to help them manage their domestic and professional lives, but finicky about boundaries. Aisha’s relationships to these people are full of suggestion. Amy is nice on the surface and more troubled, a little lost, underneath. She gives, or seems to want to give, the impression of openness, telling Aisha to make things her own, to decorate the room that’s been set aside for overnight visits as she pleases. But she routinely fails to pay Aisha on time. And she’s weird about intimacy, trying to relate to Aisha as a woman in the workplace while, in the same moment, making Aisha’s workplace — her home — untenable. It’s the kind of sharp pleasantness that can make a subordinate uneasy, the kind of smile that can make a person wonder if she’s going to harvest their organs. Adam, a photographer, crosses other boundaries — the kind you might guess. And yet he sets himself up as the good cop of the pair, the understanding, apologetic employer who will of course get Aisha those payments, who sympathizes with the problem of Aisha’s unpredictable work hours.
This would be enough material for a movie. But Jusu’s commitment is to Aisha’s fuller life and her desire to reunite with her son. The job is very much framed, by the movie, as a job. It isn’t everything. It certainly isn’t what’s making Aisha have dreams of drowning, visions of mythological figures Anansi the Spider and Mami Wata — figures born of West African legend, who haunt Aisha like some remnant of her past life while weighing her present life down with gloomy, totalizing dread. This, even as some realms of Aisha’s life show potential, as when she meets and grows close to a man named Malik (Sinqua Walls), who works the front desk of her employers’ building and has traumas and mysteries of his own to contend with. He, too, has a son; part of the attraction, for Aisha, is because he understands that her son is her world, just as he understands that great love can flourish from insurmountable pain.
Jusu’s movie is smart about the ways that power works, wise in its framing of the interiors of Adam and Amy’s home, for example, with its soft surveillance (cameras, walls of glass) and its hard, gleaming edges that persist to make Aisha look and feel out of place. Jusu directs with the eye and care of someone fully aware of all the wishy-washy tropes that typically befall heroines like Aisha. She subverts them, in part, by attending to Aisha as a person, making sure to fill the movie with Black women who, even in casual interactions, meet Aisha where she is, take an interest in her life, commiserate over the drudgeries of trying to survive. In one of the movie’s best scenes, one such woman — Malik’s grandmother, played by the wonderful Leslie Uggams — effortlessly pulls the multiple strands of the movie together into one, terrifying knot. In contrast to the awkward disruptions of Adam and Amy, Nanny gives us a film about Black mothers: protectors against a form of violence that threatens to overtake them. Some of Jusu’s wisest choices as a director involve her tendency to withhold, to submerge and tease at some of the tensions of the movie while enlivening its more extraordinary contours, allowing horrifying magic to reshape the discomfort of being a Black immigrant who’s trying to reunite her family.
That’s the thread that holds Nanny together: Aisha’s desire to see her son again. On this front, the movie becomes something of a thriller, quietly growing in urgency until it pulls the rug out from beneath you. The movie builds toward an ending that is equal parts mythological and abstract. But it’s more grounded than at first appears: you can see its reality coming from a mile off because the visions that overtake Aisha have been telling her as much all along. Nanny starts as a movie about a reality that we’d rather not face — the plight of Black domestic workers, of immigrants, of the barebones fact of financial survival — and ends as a movie about reality that we cannot bear. That is the horror of it — and, in Jusu’s hands, the galvanizing thrill.
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