Some movies, mostly to do with how they’re marketed, keep the audience guessing as to what the hell it is, exactly, right up until the moment the lights go down or they click the play button. Horror movies do better business, so the ads tend to play up the horror element in movies that aren’t really horror movies.
Take, for example, “Nanny,” an eerie, assured debut with a terrific central performance from Anna Diop.
It’s no horror film. Rather, it delves into genuine psychological thriller territory, grounded in a character study of the American immigrant experience. Now: Many if not most films broadly describable as psychological thrillers are about as psychological thriller-y as a chainsaw massacre. Rarely does a legit example of the genre lay off the brutality and bloodshed long enough to get under a character’s skin, or behind a customarily marginalized character’s eyes, to imagine unsettled interior states of being.
