Review: Nikyatu Jusu’s ‘Nanny’ artfully centers an immigrant’s terror in a palpable nightmare.
By Tom Zuidema
Nanny is a film about loss. A film about the way we cope with death. A film about what it feels like to have no life.
It’s a film about what we learn to live with when we no longer have a choice.
When I went to see Nanny in its limited release release as part of the 2016 lineup at the IFC Center, I wasn’t quite looking forward to the experience. I had seen it a couple of times before, and I felt that I had seen this film before. It was old and familiar.
And, on top of that, it seemed like the audience response to the film was going to be, “Oh, yeah, whatever.” After reading the review scores for the film, it’s clear a very big majority of people have not seen the film.
But here, in its limited release, it was fresh and surprising to me. It was a film that opened my mind to a new way of looking at things. A new way of seeing art.
There was this thing about the opening scene that struck me. When that scene was shown on the big screen, I got all this stuff from it about immigration in the US. And the thing about it is, if you look at immigration issues today in the US, it’s very much the same, and it’s in the same direction, just not in the same order of priorities.
I know that the director is from El Salvador, and he was from a village close to the capital city of San Salvador, and he felt that immigration is a very much a part of everyday life for Salvadorans.
But I was really blown away by the way that he approached the subject.
The film’s story begins with a young mother (a real actress, by the way) who has just lost her husband, and the child that was growing in her belly.
This is a small house with just two bedrooms. The family lives in that house with her three children. The father can’t find another job so he puts his children to work washing cars, cleaning offices, making food, or something else to make money. This
