At the TIFF premiere of her feature debut NANNY, director Nikyatu Jusu talked about society’s attitude towards women of colour that work as caregivers. She pointed out that historically, these jobs are held by black and brown women, but that they still remain largely invisible.

With NANNY – Jusu double-dog dares you not to see these women anymore; not to consider their story and their spirit.

NANNY is about Aisha (Anna Diop) – A Senegalese immigrant working in New York as a nanny for a well-to-do white couple (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector). Working hard caring for their daughter, Rose, Aisha’s larger ambition is to earn enough money to fly her son Lamine from Senegal to America and be reunited as a family.

Soon though, she is plagued by watery nightmares and visions…and it becomes clear that something in Aisha’s universe is very very wrong.

NANNY is a horror in the most classic of ways – equal parts Henry James and Park Chan Wook.

It holds out the beating heart of a black woman’s personal journey, wrapped viciously in the barbed wire of folklore. It is a genre film that is less concerned with the visceral terror of the body, and more one that is fixated on the cerebral terror of the soul. It wants us to consider the anxieties and microagressions that women like Aisha have to deal with on the daily, and the way that can heighten the fears they deal with just by taking up space in the world.

The result is handsome, eerie, romantic, loving, tragic, and hopeful. If that combination sounds like it’s difficult to pull off…well, it is. Jusu and her team though are here for the challenge.

NANNY fuses folkloric elements into modern living with the intention of giving a voice to women who have for too long not been heard. It does so with equal parts power and delicacy, creating something deeply affecting.

This film is a bold opening statement by a new storyteller – and a promissory note of more stunning things to come