Nanny

The American Dream in Nikyatu Jusu’s hands isn’t a white picket fence; it’s a sterile Manhattan kitchen where the faucets never stop dripping and the glass walls offer nowhere to hide. When I sat down to watch Nanny, my left sock kept slipping off my heel—one of those annoying low-cut ones that eventually bunches up under your arch—and honestly, that minor, nagging discomfort felt like the perfect physical manifestation of the movie’s atmosphere. It’s a film that lives in the itch you can’t quite scratch, the feeling of being watched in a room you're paid to clean but aren't allowed to inhabit.

Nanny arrived in 2022 with a massive weight of expectation, having scooped up the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. It was the first horror film to do so, and Nikyatu Jusu (who also wrote the screenplay) became the first Black female director to take that top honor. This was a "streaming era" darling, snapped up by Amazon Studios and dropped into the digital ether where, unfortunately, a lot of people missed its haunting, low-boil intensity. It’s a shame, because it’s a film that demands you sit still and listen to the pipes.

Folklore in the Floorboards

At its heart, we follow Aisha (Anna Diop, who you might recognize as Starfire from Titans), a Senegalese immigrant working for a wealthy couple to save enough money to bring her young son to the States. The "villains" here aren't monsters under the bed, at least not at first. They are Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), a couple whose marriage feels like a LinkedIn profile masquerading as a romance. They are the kind of people who perform kindness while conveniently "forgetting" to pay overtime, weaponizing their own fragility to keep Aisha in a state of perpetual debt.

But because this is horror—or at least horror-adjacent drama—the psychological stress starts to bleed into the supernatural. Aisha begins seeing figures from West African folklore: the spider-trickster Anansi and the water spirit Mami Wata. Rina Yang’s cinematography (she’s worked on everything from Euphoria to Taylor Swift videos) makes the water look both beautiful and suffocating. There’s a scene in a bathroom that made me legitimately nervous to turn on my own shower for a week. The horror here isn’t about jump scares; it’s about the intrusion of a forgotten home into a hostile new one.

The Invisible Labor of the Ghost

What I found most striking—and what sets this apart from the "elevated horror" pack—is how it handles the concept of "the help." We’ve seen the "evil nanny" trope a thousand times, but Jusu flips the script. Aisha is the most sane, capable person in the room, yet she’s treated like a piece of furniture that occasionally has opinions. The film captures that specific contemporary anxiety of being an essential worker who is simultaneously invisible.

The performances are top-tier. Anna Diop carries the movie with a performance that is so internal and controlled it’s almost agonizing. She doesn’t give you the big "Oscar clip" screams; she gives you the exhausted sigh of a mother who is losing her grip on reality because she’s too busy holding someone else’s child. Michelle Monaghan is equally good as the "boss from hell" who genuinely believes she’s a progressive ally while she’s effectively gaslighting her employee.

A Modern Haunting

If there’s a flaw, it’s that the ending might feel abrupt to some. We’ve become so used to horror movies ending with a giant CGI showdown or a definitive "gotcha" twist. Nanny doesn’t play by those rules. It lingers on a note that is more tragic than terrifying, which might explain why it didn't set the box office on fire during its limited theatrical run before hitting Prime Video. It’s a film that asks what we leave behind when we cross oceans, and whether those ghosts are trying to hurt us or warn us.

I loved the inclusion of Leslie Uggams (of Deadpool fame) as Kathleen, a sort of spiritual guide who provides the historical and cultural context Aisha needs. It grounds the supernatural elements in something that feels ancient and earned, rather than just "spooky stuff happening for the sake of the plot." The score by Bartłomiej Gliniak also deserves a shout-out—it’s full of these wet, percussive sounds that make the entire apartment feel like it’s underwater.

Nanny is a sophisticated, visually stunning piece of contemporary horror that cares more about the protagonist's soul than the audience's heart rate. It’s the kind of film that proves the genre is at its best when it’s digging into real-world rot—class, race, and the crushing weight of the American Dream—using the supernatural as a shovel. While it might be a bit "slow-burn" for the Friday night slasher crowd, it’s a vital entry in the new wave of social horror. Just make sure your socks are pulled up tight before you start; you don't want any distractions when the water starts rising.