[TIFF 2022] REVIEW: ‘Nanny’ is an immigration survival story
Anna Diop stars as Aisha in Nanny, written and directed by Nikyatu Jusu.
For every story of a person who emigrates to North America, building a business or joining a big organization to make a better life, there are just as many who fly under the radar. They are paid in cash, with little in the way of job security or benefits. Many of these people send as much money as they can back home, to support their families. And they’re often left to do the work that the wealthier classes can’t be bothered with.
That’s the background to Nanny, the feature debut by Nikyatu Jusu. It follows Aisha (Anna Diop), a young Senegalese woman living in New York who has taken on the job of caring for Rose, the 5-year-old daughter of a wealthy white couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector). Aisha is sending most of her earnings back to a relative in Senegal, so she can bring her son Lamine to New York to live with her. But the longer Aisha spends in the job, the more it wears on her; the long hours, missed payments, and unrealistic expectations make her miss her son even more. And that’s when Aisha’s visions begin.
It’s not quite clear if what Aisha is seeing is truly supernatural or simply how her job is affecting her mental health. First, she glimpses a frightening mermaid peering at her from the ocean, followed by intense drowning-related dreams. Her son appears to her in places he shouldn’t be. And yet she must continue to look after a child that isn’t her own, in a sort of fairy-tale exchange that seems pulled from the book of African folklore that she reads to Amy and Adam’s daughter each night.
Sinqua Walls as Malik, a doorman that Aisha meets in New York.
The first thing I noticed about Nanny is how confident it feels. Jusu has evidently been building up to this project with the work she’s done on short films over the past 15 years. The story is tidy, and the screenplay doesn’t hold our hands too often. It places Aisha on a straight path towards her harrowing encounters with her visions, with only a few brief diversions for Aisha to make a real connection in the city: the doorman at her employers’ building, Malik (Sinqua Walls). Diop and Walls have great chemistry, and that helps you root for Aisha to eventually earn enough to escape the nanny job and reunite with Lamine.
Aisha’s tasks as a nanny hearken to real-life stories of racial and social justice. Here is a recent immigrant, asked to serve a privileged white family where the parents are too careless to pay her on time, fill the fridge with groceries, or let her live much of a life outside of work. When Aisha takes it upon herself to make Senegalese meals to feed Rose, Amy is enraged. She claims that Rose can’t tolerate the “spicy” food, and alleges that Aisha has ignored all her instructions. Though the timing doesn’t line up, it feels like Amy was directly inspired by some recent ridiculous nanny ads that went viral. The film is keen to suggest that Amy’s treatment of Aisha is probably just a hint of what real workers in the nanny industry go through.
Aisha cares for Rose, the daughter of a wealthy couple.
What Nanny still needs, though, is a twistier ending. Aisha’s visions reach a critical point when she’s about to book a ticket for Lamine to join her, and the reveal that follows, while tragic, is somewhat awkward and a little underwhelming given the psychological thrills that came before. It’s as though Jusu can’t decide whether the circumstances are supernatural or tied to mental health, and Amy and Adam drop out of the story without a satisfying end to their character arcs. It would have been nice to see them realize their mistakes, and to know that Rose will turn out alright.
This weak spot aside, Jusu and her cinematographer Rina Yang capture the proceedings with vibrant and moody hues that draw your eye. Aisha often feels imprisoned or in danger in Amy and Adam’s home, and it’s certainly a stylish, if forbidding, cage. I don’t know if Jusu intends to keep working in the horror/thriller genre, but her eye for composition and colour is almost enough to get me watching spooky releases more often.
Nanny concludes on an uplifting note, underpinned with grief. The monsters have been kept at bay for now, but it remains to be seen what Aisha will face next. Something tells me her journey to feeling at home in New York isn’t yet complete.
Nanny gets three stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
The makeup and prosthetics work on the mermaid was quite good - it looked solid enough for a creature feature.
This is definitely one of the more restrained acquisitions by Blumhouse Productions, which I normally think of as a company that releases “scared teenager” movies.