The monsters in horror movies get top billing. The Orphan. It. The Babadook. The Babysitter. The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
So what to make of Nanny? She’s certainly not a monster. Not in the sense of lurking in some closet in wait to devour the soul of her prey. Without spoiling the film, she does, however, experience a psychological crisis which sends her to sinister places. But Freddy Krueger? No, she’s definitely not that.
A nanny often resides in the periphery of a film. That’s her job. Her role. Nikyatu Jusu puts the help front and center in her feature directorial debut, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — the first-ever horror film to do so. It’s not just a horror movie; it’s a horror/character study. We experience the horror of being put in the psyche of Nanny, in her lightest and darkest moments.
Nanny is Aisha. She is a Senegalese immigrant who takes care of a young girl in an affluent white family in Manhattan with the hopes of bringing her own child to join her in the States. Aisha deals with belittlement from ostensibly well-meaning privileged parents while her African roots and its mythology follow her in disruptive and supernatural ways. All the while, she manages a day-to-day life — socializing, dating, existing as a West African immigrant in the vastly different communities and neighborhoods of New York City.
“I’ve known this character my whole life through my mother,” says Anna Diop, who plays Aisha, the eponymous nanny. Like Aisha, Diop’s mother was born in West Africa and nannied in the United States. The research had been done long before Diop took on the role. “There wasn’t a lot more I needed to ask,” she says, with the exception of a few questions: “What’s the worst day you ever had at work? Do you ever feel like you’re ever truly yourself when you’re in these [affluent caretaking] spaces?” But she knows her mom’s experience pretty well; ergo she had Aisha’s frame of mind down pat.
While she says her mother didn’t have as negative an experience as her character did, she did see suffering in her mom’s profession which she believes is represented authentically on screen. Diop describes her director as “married to authenticity.” An example — nannies gossip and commiserate with each other while the kids play in the park. That’s very real. Diop says, “I’ve seen my mom congregate with my aunts and other women. I’ve seen them lament what it is to work for these people. And lament about struggles of that work and how lonely it is and how much they miss home.”
Diop meets me in the lobby of a hotel on the south end of Central Park, perhaps a 20-minute train ride from where her character works in the tony Upper East Side neighborhood. We chit-chat for a bit before her co-star Sinqua Walls shows up. It’s like Shaq just got off the bench to join Kobe. Thelma hopping in the car with Louise, or Abbot joking around with Costello. Immediately, it’s clear the duo just clicks.
Walls plays Malik, a doorman for the building Aisha nannies in. The two characters spark a romance. In order to have the romance work on screen, the actors needed to gel. Due to Covid-19 precautions, the chemistry read took place over Zoom, not the best mode of getting a read on chemistry. But Walls first impression of the vibe with Diop was, “Ok….Ohhh kkkkk.” He told his agent, “I have a good feeling there was synergy there.” He adds, “It’s rare to see that in a room when you’re chemistry reading but definitely over a zoom.”
So how did the chemistry pierce through the impersonal e-armor of Zoom? “We’re both tireless listeners,” says Walls. Diop repeats the Walls-coined term “tireless listeners,” affirming that it’s the perfect two word combo to explain the compatibility between them. It could be the perfect dating profile tagline. Walls jokes, “Put that on your profile, get more likes, followers. ‘I’m a 6’2 tireless listener.’”
“I was so relieved when I met him he was still the Zoom person. And remained the Zoom person the whole time,” says Diop. In her first ever leading role, Diop says she leaned on her co-star to get her through the novel challenge. What was the hardest part? “The pressure of fucking up the project because of you,” she says. “You’re one of the pillars. You could ruin the whole project.”
“This is new information to me,” says Walls, assuring Diop she was composed on set and indeed did not fuck it up.
Diop wasn’t the only one wading into new waters. “Nanny” is Jusu’s feature directorial debut. Both Diop and Walls say they were enamored with her short film “Suicide by Sunlight,” which played a big part in the two actors signing on to the project. The move to tackling a 90 plus minute narrative really let the young director’s talents shine, they say.
“I’ve never seen a director get so emotionally invested in a scene that they cry,” says Walls. He describes Jusu’s reaction to the shooting of a particularly poignant moment that takes place on a boat dock towards the end of the film. “You’re really here with us. Sometimes there’s that wall between the director and actors. But for her to be so invested she was feeling Aisha’s struggle, I had never seen that before.”
From watching her short films to shooting the “Nanny” to the press tour, Diop is in awe of her director. “It’s a culmination of the experience of her. Even from seeing her short and knowing that his Black female filmmaker existed that was tremendously talented, tremendously gifted,” she says. “She had this original idea. And I wondered how many other ideas she had. From the inception of knowing that she existed to [Nanny] I’ve been so inspired and hopeful about my place in this industry and where film is going because of filmmakers like her. Since the inception it’s been life-changing.”
Jusu has created an elevated horror film, beyond cheap thrills and exploitative violence. It forces us to think about race, class, history, and trauma, among other weighty topics. A genre often derided as schlock has made somewhat of a bounce back to exalted status once held by luminaries such as Hitchcock, Friedkin, and Kubrick. The most famous flag bearer of today’s elevated horror movement is Jordan Peele, who released his film “Nope” earlier this year. Peele has given Jusu his stamp of approval, inking a deal with her for a feature adaptation of “Suicide by Sunlight” under the banner of his Monkeypaw Productions. Like Peele, Jusu depicts the black experience in a genre where black characters are typically ancillary.
Diop and Qualls avoid talking explicit social themes from the film. That was never Jusu’s intention and rarely a point of discussion on set. First and foremost, she set out to make a good movie. By dint of telling the story of a West African nanny as a complex horror protagonist, the social point has already been made. Qualls says, “It didn’t feel like there were a lot of intentional social themes because the social themes are already evident in society and elemental to the story.”
In terms of thematic direction, Diop was most concerned with asking Jusu to get her in the “mental state” of Aisha at any given moment. “I wanted to pick her brain about the moments she’s experiencing the horror. ‘Is she chucking it up to exhaustion? Psychosis? Depression?’” she’d ask her director.
So what to make of “Nanny”? If you see the poster, with a wide-eyed Aisha, the title ominously dripping on her face — where does your mind go to? How about after you’ve seen the film and walked nearly 100 minutes in her shoes? Your reaction can be a litmus test of your upbringing. “Depending on when you hear that word, if you’ve thought goes to, ‘Oh the nanny is the bad person or the good person,’ it begs the question of where you are in society. Where are you in the world,” says Diop.
Back in Los Angeles, Qualls says his housekeeper had recently invited him to her son’s graduation. “I was so honored,” he says. The invitation, he says, was a kind message: “I’ve been carrying myself in the right character that you wanted me to be present on this personal day.” Qualls says one of the big takeaways of the film is that “no one is bigger than anyone else.”
And what does Diop think when she sees Nanny plastered on a horror movie poster? “For me, the nannies I grew up with were my mother and women I adored and respected and were my heroes,” she says. “My mind immediately knew that the character was a good person.”
