Mark Reviews Movies: NANNY

Nanny, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 22, 2022

There's a grounded and desperate story in Nanny, revolving around how easily, readily, and unthinkingly migrants can be and are exploited. That's the situation for Aisha (Anna Diop), a woman from Senegal who has come to New York City as an undocumented immigrant to achieve a better life for herself and her young son. She receives a seemingly ideal opportunity when a well-to-do woman hires Aisha to be a nanny for the woman's daughter. This is, of course, too good to be true in ways that are despairingly simple and potentially tragic.

The movie is the debut feature of writer/director Nikyatu Jusu, who displays a genuine understanding of these everyday trials and down-to-earth complications for her main character. The movie is mostly convincing, thanks in significant part to Diop's performance, as a low-key drama about Aisha struggling to keep her head above water, as her employer's apparent apathy puts all of her dreams in jeopardy. The movie itself struggles, though, when Jusu makes that water metaphor literal through a series of nightmares that might portend some supernatural warning or threat.

In other words, the movie gradually becomes more of a horror story than the constant fear and uncertainty of Aisha's day-to-day fears and uncertainties about her situation. It's far less convincing or developed in that regard.

Aisha is alone in the United States. Her remaining family members are still in Senegal, including her son who is currently living with one of Aisha's cousins. She's a single mother to the boy, and the circumstances of his birth are eventually revealed, adding some more depth to the pressure for Aisha to leave and to find opportunities that aren't available to her back home.

Her new job is working for Amy (Michelle Monaghan), who has an unspecified but seemingly well-paying job and stern but scatterbrained disposition. The woman's daughter is Rose (Rose Decker), who quickly takes to Aisha, starts learning French from her (Aisha was a teacher in her country of origin), and will actually eat the meals her nanny prepares for the girl.

Amy's husband, by the way, is the initially absent Adam (Morgan Spector), a photojournalist whose home office walls in the fancy, high-rise condo are covered with pictures of poverty, destruction, and pain. There's this unspoken idea that the seemingly well-meaning Adam exploits such situations for his own benefit, just as his wife takes advantage of Aisha's situation for her own.

Such notions are made clear but left mostly unexplored by Jusu, although the movie's focus on the mounting stress Aisha must face in her efforts to get her son to the United States makes such oversights or missed possibilities easier to accept. It's when the movie begins to substitute such real concerns for more mystical ones that the movie seems to be evading its deeper points and consequences.

At first, the problems seem relatively inconsequential. Amy forgets to pay Aisha once. Soon enough, the woman starts asking her nanny to make overnight stays on a last minute's notice (There's a discomforting scene in which Amy dresses up Aisha like a decoration to show off to her friends).

Meanwhile, those payments become increasingly infrequent. The return of Adam, who was unaware his wife had hired a nanny, means Aisha might have something of an ally—at least he seems to care that she's not being paid. Whether or not she can actually trust this man, who seems a bit too friendly with other women and makes a huge leap of an assumption when Aisha hugs him once out of relief, is another story entirely.

All of this is dramatically sound and, through some dreams of our protagonist nearly drowning from random floods, unsettling in the way Jusu visualizes the anxiety Aisha is confronting. Diop's naturalistic performance carries much of these quiet moments, as her character grows in both dread of what could happen and frustration with what these people are doing to her.

Even when Aisha starts dating the building's security guard Malik (Sinqua Walls), things remain grounded, but then, she meets Malik's grandmother Kathleen (Leslie Uggams), a psychic of sorts with some inexplicable insights into Aisha and knowledge mythical creatures—specifically mermaids. A narrative switch flips, and suddenly, all of those nightmares, some scenes akin psychological breaks or some supernatural visions, and actual sightings of a mermaid seem to be telling some other story.

Much of what these visions and that creature mean to the tale is left unexplained, save for the movie's big revelation. Once it arrives, Jusu seems unwilling or unable to deal with the very real consequences of something so significant, leaving it as an act of fate as mysterious as whatever the mermaid is doing in this story. Nanny doesn't need such gimmicks to make this story of a specific kind of struggle and particular form of fear compelling, and indeed, in trying to introduce those elements into this tale, Jusu loses both the point and the potential power of the story she's telling.

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