Nanny is the kind of horror film that doesn’t need a haunted house, a cursed doll, or a demon in need of an exorcist. It knows the scariest thing in 2022 is being an underpaid immigrant worker in New York City with a toxic boss, no papers, and a kid on another continent. Honestly, by the time the supernatural stuff shows up, you’re almost relieved—at least the spirits don’t “forget” to pay her.
Nikyatu Jusu’s feature debut is a razor-sharp psychological horror drama disguised as a nanny story, anchored by a phenomenal performance from Anna Diop as Aisha. The film is atmospheric, slow-burn, and deeply emotional, but it also has a vein of dark humor running through it—mostly the “laugh so you don’t cry” kind that anyone who’s ever worked for rich people will recognize instantly.
The American Dream, but Make It a Nightmare
Aisha is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant in New York, working as a nanny for Rose, the daughter of Amy and Adam, a wealthy Upper East Side couple who seem to specialize in weaponized neglect. Aisha is the one who feeds, bathes, comforts, and raises Rose, while Amy and Adam roll in and out of their pristine apartment like stressed-out satellites orbiting their own careers.
You watch Aisha soothe Rose through the night, pick up extra hours, stay late, stay over, and smile through rampant boundary violations. The “horror” at this stage is painfully real: she doesn’t get properly paid, her schedule is trampled, and she has very little recourse because of her immigration status. The pay is late, the promises are vague, and the power imbalance is enormous—which is scarier than any ghostly jump scare. At least monsters don’t send follow-up emails minimizing your overtime.
Aisha’s motivation is heartbreaking and simple: she’s working to bring her son Lamine and cousin Mariatou from Senegal to the U.S. Every unpaid hour, every manipulation by the Havs, is another delay in that plan. The movie never lets you forget that every indignity has a price that someone else—far away and small—is paying.
The House of Microaggressions
Michelle Monaghan’s Amy deserves her own category of horror: the guilty liberal employer who insists she “cares,” but not quite enough to actually treat her employee like a full human being. She hovers between performative intimacy and chilly distance, insisting Aisha is “like family,” which is apparently code for “we don’t observe labor laws here.”
Adam (Morgan Spector) is no better, and arguably worse. He has the nerve to offer “help” when they’re behind on paying Aisha, only to instead trot out sexual advances like some kind of discount Harvey Weinstein. It’s an ugly, triggering moment, and the film doesn’t play it for melodrama. It plays it for reality: that soft, suffocating terror of being cornered by someone who holds both your paycheck and your future in his hands.
The real dark humor? Aisha’s calm endurance. You can practically feel her filing each insult away under “things I will never forget, even if I survive this place.” The Havs’ apartment may look like a lifestyle catalog spread, but the energy inside it is very “cursed snow globe.”
Spirits, Myths, and Migrant Ghosts
Nanny doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares. Instead, it threads West African folklore—figures like Mami Wata and Anansi—into Aisha’s unraveling worldview. These entities show up in visions, dreams of drowning, and flickers in the shadows. Are they warnings? Punishments? Guides? The film keeps that ambiguous in a way that feels poetic rather than evasive.
Aisha starts seeing water everywhere—dripping, surging, pulling. With each unpaid paycheck, each missed call, each mounting anxiety about Lamine, that water feels less like a symbol and more like a prophecy. Her dreams of drowning blur into waking visions, and the film treats them not as random scares but as emotional echoes of her guilt, fear, and helplessness. When your life is controlled by other people’s money and whims, it makes sense that you’d feel like you’re constantly one breath away from going under.
The supernatural in Nanny doesn’t feel imported from a horror template; it feels like part of Aisha’s cultural, personal, and spiritual vocabulary. It’s not “ooh, spooky ghost!” It’s more “your ancestors have noticed you’re suffering and would like to schedule an intervention.”
Love, Briefly, Like a Lifeboat
Sinqua Walls’ Malik is a welcome counterweight: the kind, grounded doorman who sees Aisha as a person, not a service. Their relationship is tender and understated, a little flicker of warmth in the middle of all the dread. Malik’s grandmother, Kathleen (Leslie Uggams, effortlessly magnetic), is the sort of older woman who knows things—not because the script says so, but because she has That Look: equal parts affection and “I have argued with spirits before breakfast.”
There’s an undercurrent of shared spiritual perception between Aisha and Kathleen, a sense that the world isn’t just what’s in front of your face. It’s comforting and ominous at once. You get the feeling that if the dead really are circling Aisha’s life, at least she has an experienced mediator in the building.
The scenes with Malik and his young son Bishop also cut painfully close: Aisha gets to borrow the feeling of mothering without being reunited with her own child. It’s sweet and gutting—a reminder of what she’s working toward and what she’s still missing.
The Twist that Isn’t a Twist, Just a Wound
When Mariatou finally arrives in the U.S. alone, you already know something is wrong; the film has been pointing its spiritual spotlight at the water for too long. The revelation that Lamine drowned back home—while Aisha was sacrificing everything to bring him over—is devastating in a way that most horror films could only dream of. There’s no ghoulish setpiece, no gore. Just the crushing, banal reality of a child lost to the ocean.
All those visions, all that water, all that jealousy Rose attributes to Lamine… suddenly, it reconfigures. The horror wasn’t just Aisha being haunted. It was her being warned, mourned, and maybe chastised by a universe that doesn’t recognize “I was doing my best” as a shield against tragedy.
Nanny’s darkest joke is this: after all the effort and exploitation, the dream she’s been killing herself for is already dead by the time she can reach it.
Drowning as a Mood
Aisha’s attempt to drown herself in the Hudson is the logical end point of everything we’ve watched: the exploitation, the grief, the guilt, the visions, the ghost of a boy half a world away and now nowhere at all. It’s not some melodramatic, out-of-nowhere gesture; it feels like following the river of the whole film to its inevitable plunge.
But Nanny doesn’t leave her there. Malik rescues her, and in a very human, unsentimental twist, they discover she’s pregnant with their child. It’s not a cheap “baby fixes everything” ending. It’s more like life rudely insisting on continuing, even when you’d politely like to unsubscribe.
The final beats—Aisha living with Malik, Bishop, and their new baby—aren’t bright and shiny. They’re fragile. She’s still marked by loss, still haunted, but there’s also a thread of survival running through it. The horror hasn’t vanished; it’s just become part of the texture of life.
Anna Diop, Holding the Whole Film Together
Anna Diop is the gravitational center of Nanny. If her performance didn’t work, the whole film would tip over into either melodrama or vague art-house melancholy. Instead, she gives us a woman who is constantly calculating: how much of herself she can show, how much pain she can reveal, how many times she can be pushed before she breaks.
Her face does an enormous amount of work—small flinches, quiet smiles, the tightness around the eyes when Amy is “being nice” in a way that still strips her of agency. When the supernatural elements intensify, you completely buy that this is a woman whose reality has worn so thin that other worlds can poke through.
Final Verdict: A Haunting with Teeth
Nanny is a psychological horror film that understands the most terrifying monsters are systems: immigration, class, exploitation, colonial echoes, and the casual cruelty of people who treat your life like a side quest. The ghosts and myths are real and unsettling, but they’re never the punchline. They’re the chorus.
It’s a tightly crafted, beautifully acted, and thematically rich film that manages to be spiritual, political, and deeply personal all at once. The dark humor bubbles up in the absurdity of Aisha’s situation—how she’s supposed to stay sane in a world that keeps asking more while giving less—and in the film’s quiet jabs at wealthy obliviousness. You laugh, but it’s the kind of laugh that tastes a little like saltwater.
If you like your horror with atmosphere instead of jump scares, your drama with ghosts, and your social commentary with a sharp edge, Nanny is absolutely worth your time. Just don’t be surprised if, after watching, you look at your phone, your bank account, and any large bodies of water a little differently.
