Correction: now not in the way in which chances are you’ll be expecting. The clueless privilege on show within the characteristic debut of writer-director Nikyatu Jusu — a Baltimore-based assistant professor of movie at George Mason College, born to immigrants from Sierra Leone — may also be lovely nerve-racking.
Anna Diop performs Aisha, a former instructor now making do as a child-care supplier for the younger daughter (Rose Decker) of globe-trotting photojournalist Adam (Morgan Spector) and Amy (Michelle Monaghan), a micromanaging workaholic mother who intimidates Aisha along with her three-ring binder stuffed with laws. Aisha, a unmarried mom, hopes to convey her personal younger son (Jahleel Kamara) over from Africa once she will. Within the interim, Amy expects Aisha to spend an increasing number of overnights within the spare bed room, as overdue paintings and widespread trip devour the eye of her employers — when Adam isn’t hitting on Aisha. Amy, for her phase, most commonly forgets to pay Aisha what she is due. The most obvious pressure takes its toll on our protagonist, who reviews hallucination-like dangerous desires (and the occasional waking imaginative and prescient) involving water and a spidery apparition.
Those chimeras boost up after Aisha is befriended by way of Malik (Sinqua Partitions), the fascinating entrance table attendant in Amy and Adam’s development, and he introduces her to his grandmother Kathleen (Leslie Uggams), a non secular guide who colleges Aisha within the African folklore of the trickster determine Anansi the spider and Mami Wata (“mom water”).
For Jusu, they’re extra metaphorical — symbols of survival and resistance for oppressed folks, as Kathleen tells Aisha — than paranormal phenomena. That’s to not say they aren’t creepy after they do pop up, and there are a few leap scares right here and there. However the movie, in spite of being most commonly set in an enormous, pricey condominium that inexplicably appears to be illuminated simplest by way of low-wattage lightbulbs, by way of and massive resists the simple tropes of typical horror.
As an alternative, Jusu focuses, with an confident storytelling that slowly builds a temper of real-world dread, on extra corporeal considerations. Why is the condominium so darkish? That’s now not the query this promising filmmaker is focused on. Reasonably, she desires to invite, as Kathleen frames it in a problem to Aisha, “Is your rage your superpower or your kryptonite?”
R. At house theaters; to be had Dec. 16 on High Video. Accommodates some robust language, transient sexuality and a few frightening photographs. In English and a few French with subtitles. 98 mins.