‘Nanny’ Review: An Immigrant Mother Separated From Her Child Fears the Worst

Aisha didn’t transfer to New York Metropolis to lift another mom’s youngsters. She moved there with the intention of bringing her younger son over from Senegal. In an effort to pay his manner, nonetheless, Aisha should do as so many undocumented ladies have within the Huge Apple: She should play mother to a stranger’s baby, whereas a member of the family takes care of her personal again residence in Africa. In “Nanny,” debuting writer-director Nikyatu Jusu brings recent eyes to this extensively accepted dynamic, so not often seen from the angle of the immigrant employee herself.

Aisha is a robust and impartial heroine, although it’s not simple to be assertive in a tradition that expects subservience of outsiders. A assured first-time filmmaker who doesn’t shrink back from the facility of ambiguity and suggestion, Jusu attracts on points of West African folklore, invoking such supernatural figures as Anansi the Spider, a tiny trickster who makes use of his crafty to outwit bigger rivals, and Mami Wata, a seductive water spirit or mermaid with darkish motives. Their presence turns Aisha’s pursuit of alternative right into a type of nightmare, as these old-world myths conflict with the one which lured her throughout the ocean — that chimera we name the American dream.

Extra psychological than scary, “Nanny” may nonetheless be described as a horror film. It actually feels like one, as ominous noises creak and pressure beneath in any other case innocuous scenes. The movie advantages a fantastic deal from the Dolby Institute Fellowship grant, which provides choose Sundance indies (together with “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Swiss Military Man” in earlier years) a significant post-production improve. Jusu’s uneasy-making sound design creates pressure the place the visuals alone won’t, such that neither Aisha (Anna Diop, finest identified for her position as Starfire on “Titans”) nor audiences can fairly belief their eyes.

We’d ask ourselves: What’s Aisha most afraid of? She’s afraid of by no means seeing her son, Lamine (Jahleel Kamara), once more, after all. That a lot we sense within the frequent, fretful calls she makes again to Senegal, checking in with Aunty Mariatou (Olamide Candide-Johnson) to verify her boy is all proper. However she’s additionally nervous about shedding herself on this new place, about what she’s turning into in an unfamiliar metropolis the place it so usually feels as if Aisha is on the mercy of forces past her management — forces that may even be described as magic.

“Nanny” finds unique methods to convey the pressures Aisha faces in adjusting to her new residence. As a result of the character doesn’t converse a lot, her visions — just like the sight of a spider crawling into her open mouth whereas she sleeps, or the run-in with a mermaid who tries to pull her beneath on the native swimming pool — function haunting projections of Aisha’s innermost fears. They startle the character however don’t have fairly the identical impact on viewers, who could marvel at Jusu’s capability to conjure such vivid hallucinations, at the same time as they battle to interpret what they imply.

Extra intimidating in some ways is the white household for whom Aisha works: outwardly nice, but unusually threatening. They maintain the facility — to make use of, to pay, probably even to deport. Working mom Amy (Michelle Monaghan) welcomes Aisha into her elegant Manhattan condominium, with its dapper Black doorman (Sinqua Partitions) and curiously sterile design type, as if profession lady Amy and her (absent) photojournalist husband (Morgan Spector) subscribe to the Victorian philosophy that kids must be seen and never heard.

Amy does her finest to look heat and accepting of this foreigner who will probably be cooking and caring for younger Rose (Rose Decker), a lady who, as described, sounds tough and allergy-prone. Amy exhibits Aisha the room she’ll use for in a single day stays. “Please, make this house yours,” she says earlier than handing the brand new nanny a binder stuffed with tips, and we will’t assist anticipating how this caring but controlling mom will react when Aisha inevitably misinterprets one in every of her decrees.

Jusu meticulously calibrates the interactions between her characters, revealing a nuanced understanding of race and sophistication relations. No surprise Aisha imagines herself drowning on a number of events within the movie: Her disillusionment with the whole lot America represented for her is overwhelming. She’s entered a system designed to take advantage of her, the place even her allies can become predators — particularly those that establish as liberal (Jusu makes it a degree to point out that Amy and Adam have a various group of associates).

In framing your entire movie from Aisha’s perspective, Jusu upends the formulation of a well-known style, one which historically performs on the nervousness any mom may understandably really feel in entrusting a foreigner to care for his or her youngsters. What if Rose winds up preferring this substitute mother? What if the nanny goes rogue and endangers the kid? Now think about those self same uncertainties by Aisha’s eyes. “Nanny” climaxes a lot as a film like “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” may, with Aisha kneeling over Rose within the bathtub, a raised kitchen knife able to stab the kid — besides that right here, we’re seeing it from a completely new standpoint.

The twist that follows represents a type of worst-case situation for Aisha. For audiences, it might appear unusually unsurprising, even predictable, given the clues (too tidily resolved within the movie’s pinned-on epilogue). However after 90 minutes of mounting dread and mirages, of begging to be paid what she’s owed from her supposedly woke employers, actuality catches up along with her, far worse than any monster.