Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny Stretches the Horror of Maternal Sacrifice
Nikyatu Jusu is a writer, director, and producer, of Sierra Leonian descent. Her storytelling background in both film and tv carves out her power in portraying thrilling universes, telling stories of black and immigrant women who have been erased from ‘The American Dream’. Her feature film debut is mighty, leaving room to sink our teeth into real psychological horror—the micro or mundane of everyday life.
Enter Aisha (Anna Diop) a woman from Senegal, working as a nanny in America, to support her son back home. The film documents domestic labour as both a privilege, and means to an end, a lens into the reality for immigrants in the western world. Nikyatu’s work also feels semi-autobiographical from her tenderly crafted second-year graduate film ‘African Booty Scratcher’. With Nanny she further explores motherhood, migration, as well as melancholy and mysticism.
Motherhood is challenging for Aisha, though she has an all-black women support system: her cousin in Senegal, her cautious Aunt, and friends In New York, even the cash teller at the money-transfer kiosk: all portray a community that help keep her spirits up. However, this maternal haven becomes tainted by her job, evident when Aisha babysits her American child. She does this with the same affection she would offer her biological son, highlighting how a mother’s love is both sacred and selfless. Yet, this sacrifice becomes lost in translation, with unsatisfying FaceTime calls with her son, hindering her efforts to love him equally. Overall, the guilt of planting new roots in his absence unleashes a mood of mourning.
Black Girl, a film by the late great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, subconsciously garnishes Nikyatu’s work as the plot follows a Senegalese woman but instead of America, she is sponsored to France to become a nanny for a French family. An umbrella of melancholy parallels both films, with the isolation of immigrating to a foreign country feeling symbolic. This can be seen in the wide shots of the posh New York apartment of Aisha’s employers, drawing out the cold or separation she feels from her new environment. Any hope of reuniting with her past, flashes like lightening, fading behind the darkness of her new life in America. Shockingly, this might be the real horror.
Yet Aisha manages supernatural control of all the struggles that orbit her, especially when responding to every shaky situation. For example, as her demands grow for overdue wages, she trembles slightly, but her desperation to provide for her son fuels her with confidence. The job she was grateful for now resembles poison wreaking havoc. And when life tilts into further disarray, the fairy tales of Anansi the spider and Mami Water (African mermaids), read as bedtime stories to her American child, provide an African folkloric comfort. Similarly, Nikyatu soothes us with sunset hues of orange and blue on Aisha’s skin. This mercurial painting of light and shadow breed a meditative state of her joyful pull towards the sun (and her son in Senegal) yet, stars and sea water lament on her dark uncertainties in America.
Nanny is a unique psychological horror as it is released later, after all the Halloween hoopla of blockbuster films. Nikyatu thus successfully captivates us with a great story regardless of season, cult status and general film fanatical fluff. And unlike stereotypical horror tropes, Aisha a black woman, is the key piece to this puzzling story, and we pray that she survives as ‘The Final Girl’.
Nanny is now available on Prime Video.
