Nikyatu Jusu on Nanny: “I’ve learned the rules of horror, and done what I need to do to break them”

• Spoiler warning: This feature gives away some plot details

The first feature from filmmaker and academic Nikyatu Jusu, Nanny follows Aisha (Anna Diop), an undocumented Senegalese immigrant dealing with culture shock, alongside racist and misogynist microaggressions, as she works as a nanny to a wealthy white family. She’s striving to bring her son over to the US. It’s a rich, beautiful and often deeply emotional tale of desperation and longing in the face of the American immigration system. It’s also, crucially, a story of monsters.

Much of recent horror has dwelt on monsters of the mind, ones tied to newfound beliefs or spirituality – from the eponymous beast of The Babadook (2014) to the djinn in Under the Shadow (2016) and the Christian God of Saint Maud (2019). Nanny follows in that vein, yet its spiritual beings are not representative of harm but instead reactive to it. In Nanny, belief is not dogma or insanity – it is protective.

This makes sense: spirituality is a powerful force. It refracts our selves and our experiences through its cultural lens, gives us reasons or answers when the material world fails to provide them. For Aisha, these beings emerge slowly, cautiously, beginning as a series of anxious dreams about flooding and drowning after she speaks to her son, so far away.

These visions are innocuous enough at first, but as the racist and misogynistic realities of her employment accumulate, her anxieties slowly begin to invade the real world. Black patches of mould, twitches of spiders’ legs and doors creaking open instil a sense of paranoia and dread – perhaps even a forewarning of things to come.

But there is a comfort there too – a connection with the preternatural and divine. Mami Wata and Anansi, the West African spirits that haunt Aisha throughout the film, exist not just to show a closeness to cultural heritage, but also as water and fire, female and male respectively. This mishmash of binaries creates a resistant and multifaceted self, a kind of self-empowerment by engaging with other worlds (not just fantastical, but also social), first in dreams and then in reality.

Nanny is refreshingly unsubtle about its purpose. When I speak to Jusu about her film, she makes it clear that the monstrousness of the intervening spirits is a symptom of the grief and rage that come with being Black in America. “I don’t think you can tell people to not be angry about their oppression,” the director says.

In the film, this self-preserving strangeness radiates through neon visuals that nonetheless centre Aisha and respect her Blackness. This is a conscious effort, says Jusu. “I only interviewed DPs who I saw […] could light Black and Brown skin.” She chose Rina Yang because of her “edgy” style. “Together we reference photographers like Roy DeCarava, painters like Boscoe Holder […] who uses really vibrant saturated colours, which I know is seen as antithetical to horror, but I don’t care. I’ve learned the rules, and done what I need to do to break them intelligently.” The result is a film that conjures a strange unreality for its spirits, a reaction to the ordinary world that deliberately counters dull grey reality with a pervasive, liberating vibrancy.

Images of water recur throughout the film, becoming synonymous with Mami Wata, a being that cleanses and generates life as much as it drowns and suffocates. “The water motif is really prevalent in my work,” says Jusu. “Water is a prevalent source of our history, whether we chose to throw ourselves over ships rather than be enslaved, or we were thrown over. There are so many mythologies of formerly enslaved peoples building marine kingdoms. Mami Wata represents so many water entities for African people.”

Mami Wata represents want, according to Kathleen (Leslie Uggams), Aisha’s boyfriend’s mother and the mystical tutor of the film. It’s easy to see why. Water divides us; water is health, soothing; it is forever part of us, but too much of it and we are drowned. We need it, we crave it, but it is overwhelming. Mami Wata’s influence is felt throughout the film in a number of ways: in one moment she manifests as a torrential storm; in another as a gentle, eerie, androgynous mer-creature, always there to guide Aisha through her pain and point to her desire. 

There is the feminine or androgynous want of Mami Wata, but with it comes a rage, synonymous this time with fire and Anansi specifically. “Rage […] is important to me. White supremacy never wants students to remember the ways that oppressed people have pushed back against violence with violence,” says Jusu, who says she’s “thinking about activists who go missing mysteriously who had the potential to be the current Malcolm X [one of whom is seen framed on Aisha’s host family’s wall, before a raging fire] or part of the current negritude movement.”

This undercurrent of frustration underpins the film: the need to be conscious of your own social position (which, as Jusu related, can connect to any minority group but is specific here to race) and the monstrousness that that can convey to the outside world. Jusu says: “Aisha, as a Black immigrant, is reminded that no matter how much she has this homeland she thought would make her invisible to antiblackness, she still becomes just Black, and that comes with a certain amount of rage.” 

The spiritual may seem esoteric, but it manifests as self-knowledge and vulnerability: Aisha’s dreams of water and fire, of spiders and sea snakes, are not to be feared but instead harnessed. Monstrousness is radical, self-manifested power that can find itself emerging from the most mundane sources.

Speaking of Anansi, Jusu says: “I love trickster figures […] Anansi’s mantra is ‘Let’s burn this shit down even if I burn myself in the process.’” Anansi becomes synonymous with that inner fire, small but powerful, crawling into Aisha’s ear with his secrets and whispered potentials and existing on the periphery as a necessary rage that pushes back while Mami Wata’s desire overflows.

The penetration of the material world by the spiritual is, in other words, the penetration of the comforts of white patriarchal society, and of the feminine ideal of the nanny by the anger and emotionally raw potential of a loud and self-assured Black woman. For Aisha to speak out about her lack of pay, for her to engage with her white employers on an equal footing, requires a certain level of the monstrous and spiritual – a communion with monsters that our society orders us to fear. “I think we see the magic more as children, and we’re stripped of that as we adapt to all these social norms […] it’s intentional to rob us of that way of seeing.” The fire of Anansi and the water of Mami Wata become essential motivating forces for radical and necessary change. 

While much of this spirituality pulls directly from African belief systems, Nanny is designed with relatability in mind. Many of us have felt the pull of grief, the gendered tangle of emotional conditions that allow us to fight back against the forces of white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, colonialism and capitalism that make us minorities. The brilliance of Nanny is in Jusu’s capacity to manifest spirituality and identity as defence mechanisms against oppressive forces. Her film discovers the beautiful and ancient monsters within the tangle of our identities, the ones that give us life, that let us push forward. “I always want to juxtapose the light and the dark,” Jusu says. There is want and there is rage – control it, but never lose it.

Nanny is in cinemas from 25 November 2022. It had its UK premiere at the 66th BFI London Film Festival.

Now in its fifth year, the LFF Critics Mentorship Programme continues to look at how we can better serve writers from underrepresented communities. It offers an opportunity for emerging critics to develop their film writing skills and have a chance to be mentored by industry media professionals in order to help pave the way to future opportunities for paid work in the media.

This year six mentees took part in an intensive four-day programme of screenings and events at the start of the festival, mentored both as a group by co-lead mentors Akua Gyamfi (founder, The British Blacklist) and Amon Warmann (contributing editor, Empire, co-host Fade To Black) as well as being individually paired with LFF media partners at Empire, The Face, Little White Lies, Sight and Sound, Screen and Time Out for one-on-one mentoring and to help produce pieces of film journalism for their portfolio.

The mentees had full access to press screenings and events throughout the festival to write reviews and features, plus additional interview access with filmmakers and an array of guest speaker sessions and opportunities to network.