Rating: R | Runtime: 99 minutes
Release Date: November 23rd, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Amazon Studios
Director(s): Nikyatu Jusu
Writer(s): Nikyatu Jusu

Always ‘very soon’.

Nikyatu Jusu’s feature debut Nanny is an intriguing psychological horror dealing with misogyny and racism while also providing a supernatural fantasy wherein a mermaid-like monster from African folklore arrives less as the bringer of death than a harbinger desperate to warn those who death has already found. It’s a stunningly directed work with gorgeous cinematography and a suspenseful structure augmented by score and performance. We become so worried about what might happen to Aisha (Anna Diop) in the here and now that we forget the real nightmare might have already unfolded from afar.

It becomes a juggling act as a result—one that ultimately feels a bit manipulative considering how much of the danger we’re expected to anticipate reveals itself to be a red herring. Not that the terror of being put on display as an “other” within the affluent white family who employs Aisha as a nanny isn’t real. He (Morgan Spector) makes a living from photographing Black suffering and she (Michelle Monaghan) is too caught up with her own struggles as a working woman to even begin to acknowledge the ways in which she exploits Aisha are worse than the ways her male coworkers exploit her.

Where things get shaky is the assumption that our focus be set upon that dynamic. What’s going to happen in this house? Jusu isn’t afraid to bring Aisha’s suffering there, making us believe it’s a ground zero through geography when reality proves it only feels that way due to proximity to her. I would have loved some room at the end to reconcile this gray area, but the denouement moves so fast that the film simply sweeps it under the rug as though it truly was just a distraction instead. The climax is still a gut punch and everything that happens afterwards works in concert with Aisha’s journey, but it renders much of the drama moot.

I guess that could be intentional too. Jusu exploiting our expectations when it comes to these types of films to deliver a horror that, like Leslie Uggams’ “intuitive consultant” explains from her own experience, focuses on the system rather than the players. It’s not therefore about Aisha versus her employers as much as what they each represent. It’s about how white society uses and abuses Black bodies for their own gains while ignoring the human and emotional cost because they believe a transference of financial currency makes up the difference. In the end, however, they all lose as capitalism cares little for either side. We’re all expendable cogs to a dehumanizing machine.

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Anna Diop stars in NANNY; courtesy of Amazon Studios.