Nanny
What do you do with your anger?
Blumhouse Productions is one of the more interesting production companies out there. Horror might not be your thing, but if movies are your thing it’s worth taking a closer look at Blumhouse, who have taken a common component of making great art: working through constraint, and built it into their business model. Paranormal Activity (2007) was made for $15,000 and grossed over $193 million world-wide. The Purge (2013) was made for $3 million and grossed $91.3 million world-wide. Perhaps their finest moment yet, Get Out (2017) had a $4.5 million budget and grossed $255 million world-wide. The point here being that great work knows no genre or budgetary limits, And Nanny (2022) is a perfect example of this.
Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant, works as a nanny for an affluent Manhattan couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector). Aisha tends to their daughter, Rose (Rose Decker), with the kind of care and attention that suggests she understands Rose better than her own parents do. Amy and Adam, though pleasant on the surface, embody a certain brand of neo-liberal neglect—quick to praise Aisha when it benefits them, yet slow to pay her on time or recognize her agency as, you know, a person in their home. Aisha has her a son back home in Senegal, Lamine (Jahleel Kamara), and she saves her money hoping to bring him to the U.S. as soon as she can. Film buffs will have already clocked the resemblance to Black Girl (1966), and while there is clear honor being paid to the renowned older film, Nanny has a lot to add to the conversation.
This setup alone is fertile ground for rich drama, but Nanny is something more mystical. The film leans into the surreal, folding in African folklore and supernatural horror as Aisha’s anxieties begin to manifest in the form of haunting visions. (One specific bit of folklore may be familiar if you had good teachers!) She is visited by water spirits, shadowy figures that slip between dreams and reality, making her question whether she is being warned or tormented. Rina Yang’s cinematography amplifies this otherworldly unease, bathing Aisha in soft blues and deep shadows. Sunlight warms the screen up, darkness cools it down. The palette becomes political, as it flattens tonally in yuppie enclaves and starts to pop in grounded communities. Your brain will immediately register the magic at work, even if you’re not sure why. It cannot be overstated how good Yang’s work is on this film. It’s the rare film that will keep you watching on merit of visual alone. Keep an eye out for the name Rina Yang.
Director Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature is a slow-burn psychological horror* film about immigration and the unspoken toll of caregiving in a system that benefits from a person’s labor while making them invisible. There's a quiet rage simmering beneath the surface. It feels like a dream constantly on the verge of turning into a nightmare. Nanny belongs to a growing tradition of horror films that explore societal anxieties rather than rely on traditional monsters. It joins the ranks of films like His House (2020) and The Babadook (2014), where the supernatural is inseparable from the protagonist’s real-world fears. The ghosts here are not just spirits—they are the echoes of displacement, of isolation, of dreams deferred until they curdle into something else.
Jusu’s film resists the more conventional beats of horror—there are no cheap scares, no climactic confrontations with a villain. The horror is in the erasure of Aisha’s existence outside of her labor. The horror lies in the fractured connection between Aisha and her son, the way technology—a phone screen, a frozen video call—becomes both a lifeline and a barrier between them. This, more than any supernatural element, is what lingers. By the time Nanny reaches the end, it is clear that the real horror isn’t what lurks in the shadows but what is lost in the pursuit of survival. And when you experience loss, what do you do with your anger?
Nanny
Written and Directed by Nikyatu Jusu
2022
97 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Prime Video
You’ll like this if you like: His House (2020), Atlantics (2019), The Babadook (2014)
*While technically a horror movie, if you’re familiar with Blumhouse Productions, you will be shocked at the amount of horror in this movie. Calling Nanny a horror film is like calling The Beekeeper a political thriller.