Review: Nikyatu Jusu’s ‘Nanny’ artfully centers an immigrant’s terror in a palpable nightmare

In writer-director Nikyatu Jusu’s pungent, psychologically unnerving “Nanny,” the title describes a suffocating swirl of demanding job, racialized identity and terror trap for Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant and single mother trying to make a life for herself in New York. There’s no “The” in the title for a reason : In her elegantly unsettling portrait of an invisible woman straddling two notions of home — far from what she’s known, working inside a perilous system — Jusu is letting us know she’s got all diasporic women employed by wealthy families on her mind. Anna Diop in the movie “Nanny.” As intensive and worrisome as Aisha’s hauntings are — artfully handled with subtle visual shifts, sly edits and oozing audio cues — Jusu doesn’t present them as sensationalistic high points or showpieces of victimization. Aisha is the three-dimensional hero of Jusu’s narrative, after all, not its prey, which is where “Nanny” distinguishes itself in a trope-filled genre, never more so than when Malik’s keenly observant grandmother shows up — like a well-rooted tree bearing fruit for a weary traveler — to inform Aisha about these supernatural interlopers warping her reality: one a trickster, the other a water spirit, both figures from West African folklore who can zero in on inner turmoil.