"Nanny" more effective as an immigrant's slice-of-life than horror

Nanny (2022)

Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu’s “Nanny” is such an auspicious feature debut that it’s a letdown when the film doesn’t fully come together. As a closely observed slice-of-life drama about foreign displacement and guilt, it’s absorbing and empathetic. The film is less effective when this Blumhouse co-production becomes more of a literal, if still proficiently moody, psychological horror tale with a magical realist bent.

The film follows the experience of Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant living in New York City. She has a 6-year-old son, Lamine (Jahleel Samara), who’s been left behind with a friend in Senegal and with whom she communicates through FaceTime and video messages. To make enough money so she can eventually bring him to America, Aisha begins working as a nanny on the Upper East Side for a well-off white couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector). “Jobs like this, they don’t fall from the sky,” she’s advised. Luckily, Aisha is great with their daughter, Rose (Rose Decker), who’s supposedly hyper-sensitive to certain foods and allergies. Pretty soon, though, Aisha is expected to stay overnight while Amy works long hours, and Amy gets slack in paying what Aisha is owed. And then Aisha’s mind becomes splintered, dismantling everything she has been working toward. 

For the film’s first hour, Jusu tells an understated but potent character study. Evocative imagery occasionally keeps us on edge without fully submerging itself into the genre side of things. There’s still enough interest just being in Aisha’s footsteps, as she feels like an outsider and puts up with little microaggressions from Amy until standing up for herself. There’s also the growing relationship between Aisha and Malik (a charismatic Sinqua Walls), the concierge of the couple’s apartment building. Malik’s mother (a lovely Leslie Uggams) also happens to be an “intuitive specialist,” who teaches Aisha about the siren Mama Wata from West African folklore. All of this is compelling and tense on its own, but “Nanny” dramatizes itself even more with supernatural and different cultural elements, having Aisha haunted by watery nightmares, spiders, and mermaids. A few of these dreamlike moments are individually eerie, but tonally and narratively, they just don't quite connect.

“Nanny” isn’t incapable of sustaining a sense of dread, helped by director Jusu and cinematographer Rina Yang proving to have such a striking visual eye. Anna Diop is really great here, allowing us to empathize with Aisha’s own experience clashing with the lives of a privileged white family. Simultaneously, we are emotionally involved and appropriately adrift in following Aisha's tragic yet hopeful journey, but the film adds up to an underwhelming whole. Because of Diop’s naturalistic, fine-tuned performance, the film’s final revelation can't help but be a haunting punch in the gut. There’s just the wish that the beautifully photographed pieces of “Nanny” cohered more meaningfully to earn that revelation. 

Grade: C +

Amazon Studios released “Nanny” (98 min.) in select theaters on November 23, 2022, followed by a streaming release on Prime Video on December 16, 2022.