In “Nanny,” water is a near-constant presence. It flows from faucets, breaks through walls, and is both a grounding and threatening force to its protagonist.
Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature (which is now streaming on Prime Video) follows Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese emigrant who works as a nanny for a wealthy family to save up to bring her son to America. When otherworldly forces start to pervade Aisha’s life, water opens a portal between the human and spirit worlds.
“As a kid, I learned how to swim and I really took to being in water. It’s a peaceful source of life for me,” said the writer-director in an interview with TheWrap. “I’m aware of both its rebirth and birth elements and its destructiveness, its capacity to destroy everything that humans have created.”
Jusu credits both her love of water and the idea for “Nanny” to her parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Sierra Leone.
“The seeds of it started with pieces of my mother’s story,” she said. Growing up in Atlanta, she watched her mother sacrifice her own aspirations, working domestic jobs that “were well below what she was capable of” to put her through private school.
That seed began to grow roots when she attended film school in New York, where nanny culture is “all on the surface. Like, the class divide in New York is very visible in a way it’s not so visible in other cities.”
But Jusu wasn’t interested in crafting a “straightforward drama” from these observations. She knew she wanted to explore “the darker genres of horror and thriller,” along with West African folklore.
Folk characters like Anansi the Spider and the African water deity Mami Wata feature in Aisha’s increasingly disturbing nightmares, which often end in her drowning or being drowned.
Water also carries historical weight as a symbol of resilience and self-determination for African diasporic peoples.
“Enslaved people who were dragged from their native lands to the West were thrown overboard when they were sick. They chose to jump overboard rather than be enslaved,” Jusu said. “There were rumors about a marine kingdom under the water who chose death over enslavement. So it’s a really prevalent motif in our history as Black people, but also in the art of Black artists who I admire, [such as] Toni Morrison.”
“As I navigated this African diasporic story of this African woman who emigrated from Africa to America to carve out a new life,” she added, “water just felt like a really organic motif to incorporate and weave into her story.”
When it came to casting her lead, the ability to “maneuver the intricacies of being underwater and above water” was a must, given the number of aquatic sequences and tight shooting schedule.
In Diop, she found a “gorgeous” actress with the skills and talent to match.
“As a Libra, I like beautiful things,” Jusu said. “But beautiful things are not enough. There needs to be the depth and the range. Humility was a big thing with her. She’s really about the craft.”
Her main criteria for the rest of the cast were intelligence and self-awareness. That was important for the actors playing Aisha’s employers who weaponize their white privilege and class status against her. Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector “asked smart questions,” building on what was on the page. (“I like to use the script as a springboard. I don’t like to use it as a Bible,” Jusu noted.)
Before shooting commenced, Jusu fought for time to rehearse with the cast and let ideas unfold organically. “I was really grateful for that time, because that’s where you find the magic,” she said. “If you trust your team, you earn the right to experiment on set. And that’s what we did.”
It was a long and winding road from development to production to Sundance 2022, where “Nanny” became the first horror film to win the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize.
Jusu spent a decade “starting, stopping, revisiting, overthinking the project, and revisiting other projects that I hoped would be my first features,” she said, “But I always drifted back to ‘Nanny.’”
Nearly a year after the film’s festival debut, Jusu is “still processing the reaction” to it. And while she’s itching to get back behind the camera, there’s a duality to that, too: “I’m sitting in gratitude.”
“Nanny” is now streaming on Prime Video.