Genre: Horror – Social
Premise: Aisha is an undocumented nanny caring for a privileged child. As she prepares for the arrival of her only son, who she left behind in her native country, a violent supernatural presence invades her reality, jeopardizing the American Dream she’s carefully pieced together.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List. Nikyatu Jusu has made her name on writing and directing a lot of short films. This will be her first feature as a writer-director.
Writer: Nikyatu Jusu
Details: 104 pages
“Nanny” seems to be the exact type of script Hollywood is looking for at the moment – a horror script laced with social commentary. But is this the next Get Out? Or just a deep character drama masquerading as a horror film? Let’s find out!
26 year old Aisha, a Senegalese nanny, comes to New York to work for a rich family. Aisha has a plan in place. Back in Senegal, she has a little boy, Kofi. This job should allow her to save up enough money to bring her son to live in America.
Amy is the mother Aisha works for. And her five year old daughter, Chloe, immediately falls in love with Aisha. While at first, everything seems great, Aisha starts to notice some cracks in the affluent family. Adam, the husband, is always gone. And because of this, Amy has developed a serious drinking problem.
But shit really hits the fan when Amy starts shorting Aisha on her paychecks. 20 dollars here, 40 dollars there. Then Aisha starts doing overnights that she doesn’t get paid for at all. Aisha tries nicely to bring this up Amy, who’s always apologetic, pooling together any cash she can find around the apartment and throwing it at Aisha. But she’s still always short.
Aisha eventually starts dating the doorman, a studly African guy named Malik, who Aisha bonds with over being single parents. Then Aisha meets Malik’s grandmother, who’s a psychic. Aisha confides in her that she’s been having these nightmares about an evil mermaid woman. The grandmother gives her the typical spiel about how when the spirit wants something, you have to find out what it is, or whatever.
Finally, we begin to think something odd is going on with Aisha’s son, Kofi. Whenever she Facetimes with him, his picture freezes up. And while all of Aisha’s friends seem to know about Kofi, he’s always spoken of generally. Does Kofi even exist? Has he been taken by the Mermaid Spirit? These are the questions we are left with as we head into the final stretch of “Nanny.”
I’m going to add a new genre to the cinema lexicon.
Fake-Horror.
Fake-Horror is a script or film that promotes itself as a horror film despite the fact that there’s no actual horror in it.
Two of the most disappointing horror components are ‘bad dreams’ and ‘scary mirror moments.’ Any horror thing that happens in a dream is not actual horror because there’s no physical threat. You’re not actually in danger, which is a key component to why horror is effective. Nor is using a mirror to show a scary image that’s more about the SYMBOL of the image rather than the actual monster/ghost/being. Again, if it’s not a physical threat, it’s not real horror.
It’s the movie equivalent of blue balls.
“Oh look! I’m going to give you horror. I’m going to give you horror! Ah ha, nope, enjoy a character driven drama.”
Let me tell you why doing this is so detrimental to the script. Because “Nanny” actually has some good stuff in it. The interplay between Aisha and the family she works for is really well done. The mother is drunk all the time. Underpaying her. Aisha’s having to use her own money to feed Chole. And then you have this scumbag dad who’s looking for all these opportunities to make a move on Aisha.
Watching Aisha try to navigate all that is fun.
But none of it matters because all I kept thinking was, “When is the horror going to show up?” Not psychological horror. REAL HORROR. Shit that puts the character in danger. If you promise something with your premise and don’t deliver, people are going to leave upset EVEN IF your movie is good. Because nobody likes to be lied to.
And critics don’t help. Critics love these movies for some reason. I think because they get off on the symbolism. But audiences hate them. It reminds me a lot of that movie on Netflix called “His House.” It was the exact same thing as this. The horror was all symbols and nonsense. And it got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which should tell you right there how worthless their scoring system is. But go over to IMDB and audiences gave the movie a 6.5.
I think this gets to a deeper issue with me that I’m admittedly sensitive about. Which is people writing for critics and awards rather than who they should be writing for, which is audiences. Horror is supposed to be that one genre you can depend on having fun with.
Now you may say that this is what the industry wants right now – social commentary horror. Which is fine. But when it comes to horror films, you can never write a horror movie where the horror is secondary to the message. Horror doesn’t work that way. People come to horror movies to be scared. Get Out showed us the template for how to do that right.
And again, the reason it’s so frustrating is because I want to celebrate this script. It does some things well. Normally in these character driven movies, GSU is thrown out the window. But Aisha has a goal – a very powerful one: she’s trying to save up money to bring her son here. How much bigger of a goal can you ask for?
The writer, Jusu, also throws a lot of obstacles at that goal to keep things interesting. For example, Amy is always short with her payments. This puts Aisha in a precarious position. She needs this job which means she can’t rock the boat. Yet, she needs every cent of her paycheck to get her son here. Imagine a Senegalese nanny having to stand up to her rich employers to tell them enough is enough. They need to start paying her what they owe her.
And I liked how Jusu played with the execution of that storyline. It wasn’t just a black and white solution. Aisha has to go to the father because he’s more willing to give Aisha the money. But then he’s telling Aisha she can’t tell Amy about this. And then he kisses Aisha one night. And, obviously, she has to keep that secret from Amy now, while not getting too angry with the dad, lest he stop paying her, because then NEITHER parent will be paying her. So it all gets rather intricate and interesting.
But, in the end, I didn’t care. I was so mad that the horror never showed up. And what little did show up was weird and confusing. Aisha is being haunted by a mermaid monster?? Only in the vaguest most symbolic of symbolic pretentious college English classes would someone be able to make sense of this choice.
Why are we having mermaid spirits in a movie about a New York nanny??????
Ugh. This was so frustrating. This had the potential to be really good. That’s why I’m mad.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Refrain from overwriting imagery in your scripts. “At the foot of one doorway, shards of light refract like luminescent knives off a pool of blood.” I don’t even know what this means. I see lines like this all the time in scripts, usually on the first page. Stop trying to impress readers. Just give us clear imagery.
What I learned 2: The more vague and symbolic your horror monster is, the less effective he will be as an antagonistic force.
