American filmmaker of Sierra Leone origin Nikyatu Jusu, after a series of short films, finally decided to make her debut feature film. With this more psychological drama than classic horror, she presented herself at Sundance, where she received a major jury award in the American feature film section, and she continues to deal with the issue of the position of black women in today’s America in “Nanny”. Aisha (Anna Diop) is not only a black woman, but she is also an undocumented immigrant from Senegal living in New York while her son is still in Africa. Luck seems to smile on this woman who worked as a teacher in her homeland when a wealthy and successful couple (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector) from the Upper East Side hires her as their daughter’s nanny.
And Aisha thinks that now she can finally start dreaming of her American dream, and she immediately starts saving money to bring her son to America, but as we learned a long time ago, the American dream was not conceived in such a way that it would come true for everyone. It is another in a series of modern American fringe horrors that have a strong author’s touch, stylized, visually striking, so Jusu plays with colors in an interesting way and finely contrasts the typical African colors and rich palette with the gray, coldness of the modernist apartment that practically becomes Aisha’s new home. and the city itself in general.
Unfortunately, like many other new American films, it was a film in which much more attention was paid to everything on the side, and as if the most important thing – the story – was forgotten. Although it is clear to us from the beginning that the couple who hired Aisha is not nearly as ideal as they want to portray, which she will understand, African folkloristics and mysticism are thrown in there as well. By the end, we’ll understand why, because practically as soon as she starts working as a nanny, Aisha will start experiencing creepy nightmares in which she or someone around her seems to be drowning. And the pace of the film is quite problematic, slow, at times tiring so that this psychological horror – character study in the end did not live up to expectations.