Immigrant nanny Aisha, piecing together a new life in New York City while caring for the child of an Upper East Side family, is forced to confront a concealed truth that threatens to shatter her precarious American Dream.... (Full plot summary below)
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Immigrant nanny Aisha, piecing together a new life in New York City while caring for the child of an Upper East Side family, is forced to confront a concealed truth that threatens to shatter her precarious American Dream.
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| Little White LiesZahra Al HadadIn Nanny, first time feature filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu takes the spotlight and shines it on this unexplored sect of society, creating a beautiful yet chilling tale surrounding identity, love, and motherhood peppered along with terror, tension, and African mythology. |
| The A.V. ClubMatthew JacksonIt’s not a film that seeks to freak you out with jump scare after jump scare, but rather a film that wants to burrow down into your heart and fester, seeping into your room like a slow trickle of water. |
| The New York TimesManohla DargisJusu draws fluidly from different genres and modes in “Nanny” — from scene to scene, the movie plays like an immigration drama, a lonely woman melodrama and a cruel labor farce — but at one point you realize that what you are watching looks, sounds and feels like a horror movie. |
| SlashfilmShania RussellArmed with mythology and its evocative atmosphere, Nikyatu Jusu's directorial debut revels in slow-simmering horror, haunting with its shadows. |
| The Film StageMargaret RasberryHer feature debut nods to Ousmane Sembène’s seminal Black Girl while distilling the trials her parents, immigrants from Sierra Leone, endured as Jusu grew up in Atlanta—a mix of domestic drama and frightening images to make us fellow outsiders in a suffocatingly insular world. |
| Time OutSahir Avik D'souzaIt swings with aplomb from moments of tenderness and lightness to tragedy and cruelty. |
| The Hollywood ReporterJourdain SearlesWith Nanny, Jusu crafts a contemplative, thematically rich story that deftly explores the emotional and spiritual costs of leaving your homeland behind for an uncertain future in a strange land. |
| Washington PostMichael O'SullivanThe film, despite being mostly set in a huge, expensive apartment that inexplicably seems to be illuminated only by low-wattage lightbulbs, by and large resists the easy tropes of conventional horror. Instead, Jusu focuses, with an assured storytelling that slowly builds a mood of real-world dread, on more corporeal concerns. |
| Slant MagazineKeith WatsonWriter-director Nikyatu Jusu’s film ultimately proposes that survival is the greatest form of resistance. |
| Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleIn her elegantly unsettling portrait of an invisible woman straddling two notions of home — far from what she’s known, working inside a perilous system — Jusu is letting us know she’s got all diasporic women employed by wealthy families on her mind. And that their fears can easily become nightmares. |
