By Adam Nayman

A horror movie so elevated it rises above any pressing need to be scary, Nikayatu Jusu’s Nanny concerns a Senegalse woman, Aisha (Anna Diop), who takes a well-paid gig as a semi-live-in caregiver for a wealthy New York couple. Her employers are, obviously, less perfect than they seem: the  family’s SUV-sized refrigerator, packed to the top with colour-coded tupperware, manifests a fearful bougie symmetry to rival Get Out’s Kubrickian tableau of skim milk and Fruit Loops. 

A Tisch grad and decorated shorts director making her feature debut, the Sierra Leone–born Jusu is, like a lot of other smart, would-be genre filmmakers, working under the sign of Jordan Peele, albeit minus the humour that works to leaven his severe conceits. (This season’s Atlanta standout “Trini 2 de Bone” framed a similarly sinister domestic-help scenario with winningly absurdist aplomb.) So while Nanny has been very conscientiously broken up into discrete, well-sculpted set pieces, the processional quality of the structure exacerbates the thinness of the connective tissue. Everything we see and hear is loaded with subtext (some of it insidiously perceptive about the perilous psychic slippage that occurs in quasi-parental situations), but the surfaces, however immaculate (the fab cinematography is by Rina Yang), are flat. Aisha’s recurring, symbolic hallucinations of trickster figures from African mythology belong less to the character than her director, and, because the whole movie has been torqued more for design than drama, the cruelly delayed, wholly predictable plot twist that winds things up feels like the solution to an equation—nothing less, and nothing more. 

Adam Nayman