Nanny: Troubled Water

As she tries to get her bearings in New York City and to earn enough money to bring Lamine to the U.S., Aisha finds work caring for Rose (Rose Decker), the young daughter of wealthy white Manhattanites Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector). Aisha’s relationship to her employers becomes a window onto the ways that white people, no matter how liberal they may think they are, constrain Black folks. Adam is mostly absent, but we do learn that he’s very busy with extramarital flirtations and his photography, which documents global Black leftist protests. (What does it say about the world if a white man who can’t see the humanity of the Black nanny caring for his child can be the one to frame people’s understanding of Black radical politics?) While he flutters in and out of focus, Amy is a consistently claustrophobic presence, presenting herself with facile and empty shows of niceness. In one early scene, as Amy prepares a small party to welcome Adam home from his travels, she convinces Aisha to wear a formfitting outfit the color of freshly spilled blood. “I swear this dress was made for your skin,” Amy says, her hand touching Aisha with unwanted intimacy, making it clear that she sees her employee as an ornament, as well as a body from which labor is to be extracted.

In the couple’s sterile home, Aisha finds herself at the mercy of Amy’s moods and whims—her inability to pay on time; her constant, last-minute requests for overnight stays; her anger, which pours out of her when she realizes that Aisha has been letting Rose eat Senegalese food (which she worries is “way too spicy for her tummy”) instead of the bland slop that Amy has prepared for her. Aisha dedicates most of her waking hours to caring for Rose and navigating her bosses’ unrealistic expectations—a bind that evokes a long history, stretching back to the days of slavery, of Black women forced to spend more time with white people’s children than with their own. Aisha gives Rose the kind of tender and healthy relationship that the child lacks with her own mother; through Aisha, we see that the work of a nanny is, in a sense, a form of mothering. But all of this comes at a cost.

The care that Jusu brings to her telling of Aisha’s story is influenced by the director’s own background and the curiosity it instilled in her. In October 2022, I interviewed Jusu for a profile in New York magazine, and she spoke with me about the challenges of being a Black artist and the battle to get Nanny made on her own terms at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also learned more about her childhood and her path to filmmaking. Her parents moved to the U.S. from Sierra Leone and raised her in East Point, a suburb located southwest of Atlanta. She grew up in a multigenerational household where her parents spoke Krio and Mende and exposed her to culinary and cultural practices that were not respected in the white spaces she was forced to move through, like her Christian high school. Later, in her college years, Jusu initially hoped to become a biomedical engineer, but a new path emerged when she took a screenwriting class to fulfill an English requirement. After earning her film degree in 2005, Jusu enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she began to hone her interests and her voice as a filmmaker. She went on to accept a position on the faculty of George Mason University’s film program and relocated to Baltimore.

What has stuck with me most from our conversation is the love and understanding with which Jusu spoke about her mother, who, in addition to doing a myriad of other jobs, sometimes made a living as a domestic worker, while writing two self-published novels in her spare time. The director has described Nanny as a love letter to her, as well as to all Black and brown mothers who have been thwarted from realizing their dreams.

But to attribute Jusu’s power as a filmmaker solely to her biography would be a disservice to the artfulness of Nanny, which deploys elements of fantasy and horror in giving us access to Aisha’s psyche. The protagonist’s fears sometimes manifest in the form of spiritual forces that have roots in West African folklore—forces that disrupt her carefully maintained life. In one scene, the camera reveals the shadow of Anansi, a trickster spider, stretching across a wall; in another, Mami Wata—a water spirit embodied here by a woman with a fish tail and blackened eyes—plunges Aisha into the darkened abyss of a public pool. Jusu and cinematographer Rina Yang cultivate a feeling of unease through their framing, the velvet shadows that lurk in their compositions, and their transcendent use of jewellike color. Among their inspirations for the film’s visual approach were photographer Roy DeCarava and painter Boscoe Holder, who shared an interest in the dynamism and beauty of Black bodies, something that can also be found throughout Nanny. Scholar Wallace D. Best has argued that “a black body in motion is never without consequence,” and Jusu brings this idea to bear in how Aisha’s presence affects the spaces she moves through and the people she encounters. Nanny’s aesthetic sensibility recalls that of an earlier work by Jusu about a Black mother under duress, the 2019 short Suicide by Sunlight, a film that also bristles with intrigue, overheated beauty, and the threat of potential violence.

Jusu most fully exposes these divisions in a scene that occurs halfway into the film, in which Amy tries to connect with Aisha by venting her frustrations about the corporate glass ceiling. After a work meeting of Amy’s runs late, keeping Aisha on the clock longer than expected, Amy tells Aisha that she has just gotten a promotion without a raise. “You know what it’s like, right?” she says. “Being a woman overseeing everything . . . But we’ll never be one of the guys, really, because it’s a fucking boys’ club.” This brief exchange is a microcosm of how white femininity works, flattening womanhood by privileging one group’s experience over all others’. How can Aisha react when Amy’s complaints ignore the noxious reality of Black women not being afforded the protection that comes with the project of white American womanhood?

Anna Diop plays Aisha’s responses to Amy with a cool, gimlet-eyed understanding of the costs her character might have to pay if she defends herself too much. Both physically and verbally, Diop conveys that Aisha’s love for her son is her abiding motivation, but she does so without rendering her a simplistic martyr. Whether Amy is denigrating Senegalese food or eyeing Aisha with a curiosity laced with suspicion, Diop imbues Aisha with a steadfast confidence and a refusal to make herself smaller to prop up the white fragility of her employers. But Jusu doesn’t focus only on Black folks’ struggle for survival. What makes Nanny so powerful is how it shows that joy and suffering exist on a continuum for Black people.

Nanny is resplendent with examples of Aisha finding care within her community. In one scene, we hear fragments of her backstory—the neglect of Lamine’s father, an older married man, forced her to seek a future for her family abroad—as she chats with an African immigrant who braids hair at a salon. Aisha shares a warm rapport with a Black woman teller she sees when she sends money back home to help Lamine and the family looking after him. Aisha also forms a bond with Malik (Sinqua Walls), a single parent who works as a doorman at the building where Amy, Adam, and Rose live. Aisha softens in Malik’s presence, and as their flirtations heat up, he asks her out, and they begin a relationship. Their first date is one of the most entrancing visions the film conjures; the dark-skinned couple seem to glow from within as they’re enveloped by light the color of ocean depths, ripe plums, and monstera leaves. Subsequent scenes that center on their romance show Aisha finding a safe place to land amid all the horrors she faces.

One of the most compelling figures in Aisha’s community is Kathleen (Leslie Uggams), the grandmother who raised Malik. The closeness that develops between the two women serves as an argument for cross-cultural Black connection throughout the diaspora. It is Kathleen who reveals to Aisha the complexity of Malik’s bond with his deceased mother, a woman beset by schizophrenia who was treated brutally by police while in the throes of mental anguish. And it is Kathleen who further contextualizes the encroachment of Anansi and Mami Wata on Aisha’s life, explaining how these forces “challenge the dominant order, subverting it through chaos, anarchy, creative energy.”

In the end, water emerges as the central spiritual force of the film. A multilayered symbol throughout the Black diaspora, water invokes traumatic experiences in African American history, such as the Middle Passage and racist exclusion from public pools, as well as African rituals of cleansing that predate colonialism. Aisha’s encounters with water are often terrifying: she dreams about a torrent drowning her in bed, and one evening, while giving Rose a bath, she has visions of violence. But there is also beauty in how the film hinges on the divine qualities of water, especially in its final section. A sudden tragedy leads Aisha to throw herself into a river, only to be brought back to safety by Mami Wata. Her rescue leads to the film ending on a note of joy, delivered via a montage that gives us a taste of the life Aisha will go on to build with Malik and the child they will have together. It’s a powerful artistic choice, but joy is never simple in the worlds that Jusu creates, and Nanny doesn’t coddle or condescend to Black audiences. Instead, it speaks to us intimately, offering the same communion that Aisha finds for herself.