At the center of Nanny is the deeply emotional story of a woman just trying to do her best for her child. It is simply a matter of writer/director Nikyatu Jusu, making her feature debut in the latter role, failing to trust that such a story does not need the distractions present in the genre exercise the movie eventually becomes. This is potentially rich material on its own, made fatally simplistic by reducing what it seeks to explore to a series of horror-laden set pieces and extended dream sequences. As a filmmaker, Jusu clearly has an eye, but her screenplay is neither detailed nor distinctive enough to escape the trap of its own eventual formula.
For a while, the film does not even operate (in the usual way, at least) as a horror film, simply introducing Aisha (Anna Diop), an immigrant to the United States from Senegal, to which she hopes to return soon to find a better life for her son Lamine (Jahleel Kamara). Her best chance lay with impossibly rich white parents willing to pay top dollar for a nanny, and, in this case, those parents end up being Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector) and their daughter Rose (Rose Decker). A genuinely amusing and subversive detail of Jusu’s screenplay is that Amy’s occupation, which pays for their swanky home set-up, remains an elusive cypher to Aisha – who, after all, eventually doesn’t care a lick about whatever the job is.
That’s because there comes a time when Amy and Adam’s money stops coming, and each makes a flimsy excuse for the other as to why that is, what the solution will be, and when the money will start coming in again. This is the first nightmare for Aisha, who is played by Diop in a truly great performance that balances incredible resilience with an ascending exhaustion that peaks just as the terror of her situation begins to loom. Unfortunately, Diop’s performance increases in power while the film around her repeatedly proves not to match her intensity or grace.
Eventually, a pattern develops within this narrative, as things turn supernatural in nature for Aisha. She hallucinates spiders and other creepy-crawlies entering her mouth or other orifices, and in her dreams, she drowns helplessly in the sea. Psychologically speaking, one knows this is all simply a manifestation of her professional and personal anxieties. A few sequences reflect this, such as when Aisha learns what the cost of bringing her son home might be (as well as just how much Amy and Adam seem to care about her predicament) and when the shoe drops for those crucial payments from Amy to arrive on time and in full.
Other sequences, though, hint at something more menacing and mysterious in store for Aisha, especially with the introduction of her romantic interest, security guard Malik (Sinqua Walls), and, more importantly, his grandmother (Leslie Uggams). The latter has a stern prediction and warning for Aisha about what her visions and dreams mean, which come to fruition in the final reel, as more visions and dreams bleed into reality and hint at an unthinkable tragedy on the horizon. There is real, tangible pain in Nanny, but the movie is so distracted by trying to do something different that it buries itself in far too much ambiguity.
Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios
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