‘Nanny’ Review: Social Horror Meshes Uneasily with Character Drama in Nikyatu Jusu-Directed Chiller [Sundance]

I always see the nannies when I take my kids to the park. They’re hard to miss, over there on the park benches with the strollers and bags of snacks, gossiping and swapping war stories and strategies and shouting out admonishments to the cherubs they’re there to supervise. There’s a story to be told about these women, the kind of story that doesn’t get told in mainstream movies all that often, because these are stories about women, often of color, may of them immigrants, sometimes undocumented. They’re kept in the background of other peoples’ stories – or, on the rare occasion when a film is made about one, she’s played by Scarlett Johansson.

“Nanny” is the story of such a woman, and when it is content with telling her story, it’s quite satisfying indeed. Her name is Aisha (Anna Diop), and she’s a young Senegalese woman in New York whom we meet on her first day of a new job. “Work hard to keep it,” advises her auntie, heading out to work herself.  “Jobs like this, they don’t fall from the sky.”

READ MORE: Sundance 2022 Preview: 20 Must-See Movies From The Festival

Aisha then reports for work at the Upper East Side apartment of an attractive couple. The mom (Michelle Monaghan) is all smiles, a type-A personality; but for a young mother in that neighborhood, it comes with the territory. The husband (Morgan Spector) is a bit more of a puzzle, a photographer who comes and goes a bit more freely. They’re good liberals, they think, but their interactions with Aisha are peppered with microaggressions. The mother compliments her red dress by saying it was “made for your skin,” while the father tells her of the take-out they’re sharing: “I got this extra spicy.”

There are inherent peculiarities and inevitable hostilities in this dynamic, in which a child is handed over to an outsider who becomes an insider (particularly when the smiling little blonde girl gets attached, as this one quickly does). These landmines are difficult to reckon with, even without the racial component. But when the marriage is as much of a façade as this one, the outsider becomes altogether too familiar with the complexities and issues of that relationship too. 

And on top of all of that, Aisha has a child of her own, an adorable little boy who lives back home with his aunt. She only sees him on FaceTime and video messages, but he will join her in America soon – if she can get the money together quickly enough. Therein lies the real discrepancy: Aisha must take care of someone else’s child in order to eventually, hopefully be able to take care of her own.

These scenes are the best in the picture, both in terms of Nikyatu Jusu’s writing and direction and the tricky performances of Diop, Monaghan, and Spector. Aisha also has a sweet little romance with the building’s doorman (Sinqua Walls), which is very charming in part thanks to the actors’ tip-top chemistry. Had Jusu just told that story – which is, again, one we have not seen before – she might have really had something here.

Alas, “Nanny” attempts to spruce up this nuanced character drama with a bunch of supernatural mumbo jumbo. It begins organically, with Aisha’s odd (but understandable) feelings of displacement within her surroundings, manifested in strange noises, unsettled rumblings, and other ambient sounds, along with creepy shadows crawling up the walls and increasingly realistic nightmares. These visual and aural manifestations of her frazzled state of mind are affecting enough, but when the picture starts to give itself over to outright horror elements, they feel jarringly out of place – devised or even inserted to make the picture more marketable in a post-Jordan Peele marketplace. It all seems disconnected from the story we were so expertly drawn into, like a sizzle audition reel for a TBD horror gig.

And that’s a shame, because Jusu has a good ear for character dialogue (not to mention a good eye for genre set pieces, incongruent though they may be). And Diop is downright astonishing in a role rich enough that she can play all kinds of notes – romantic, withdrawn, forceful, fearful – and hit every one of them.

There’s always a danger in dinging a film – or a book, or a play – for being what it is, rather than what you think it should be. But “Nanny” feels less like a misfire than a missed opportunity. Those early scenes are so tightly wound and so beautifully played that by the time Jusu trots out the blood and knives and bathtubs, I wasn’t even sure what movie I was watching anymore – especially when it returned to down-to-earth familial drama with real stakes and real tension at its conclusion. It’s whiplash-inducing. All things considered, “Nanny” is a pretty good movie. But it feels there’s a great one fighting to break out. [C+]

Read along with all our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival