The premise of The Man in My Basement reads interesting on paper, until you think about it a little harder and start wondering how it will stretch into a full feature runtime, or evolve past its obvious metaphor already visible in the title and poster, to give us something thought provoking and engaging. The film from newcomer Nadia Latif, unfortunately, does not find that answer.
Adapted from a novel by Walter Mosley, an American writer best known for his crime fiction, it tells the story of Charles, a Black man in his thirties who has descended from a long line of landowners in Sag Harbor. He is unemployed, drinking too much, and on the verge of losing both his remaining friends and his ancestral home. That is, until a wealthy stranger, played by Willem Dafoe, knocks at his door with a bizarre offer. He will rent Charles’s basement for a large sum. By “rent,” he actually means imprisoning himself there. Meanwhile, Charles uncovers old family masks and begins experiencing unsettling visions. With this setup, the film promises a tense psychological thriller that could explore race, power, legacy, desperation, guilt, and invasion of privacy. After an effective first act, it feels like we are on the right track.
The casting of Dafoe alone lifts the film. An actor capable of suggesting menace with the subtlest expression, he keeps our attention whenever he is on screen. His initial request is obviously off-putting, yet Dafoe brings such conviction that it feels like something he must do, and we sense the danger of what might happen if he is denied. At the same time, we know there is more to his agenda than he admits. No one chooses to live locked in a basement. Opposite him, Charles is bravely established as deeply unlikable, a role Corey Hawkins (who stepped in after Jonathan Majors was dropped from the film following the off-screen controversies) embraces fully. Once all the pieces are in place, the question becomes: what will the film do with this material, and where will it take the story?
The answer, unfortunately, is nowhere fascinating. After a slow but steady first act, the film fizzles once Dafoe’s character starts revealing flashes of his true nature, with expressions that inevitably recall his Green Goblin. Nearly the entire film is composed of long one-on-one conversations, often structured like stage plays, ending with one character leaving in anger. Most of the running time is spent on verbal battles that circle the same themes without moving forward. There are occasional variances in the setting, like the prison becoming more complex each time, or us seeing Dafoe growing used to his life there. There is a scene that has Dafoe going full frontal nude in an attempt to assert power, and we do see the dynamic slowly shift, but the rhythm mostly stays the same.
The central metaphor is clear enough, and Latif brings her own experience as an immigrant into the film’s examination about white people invading a Black man’s space, linking it to questions of cultural invasion. But where a film like Sinners earlier this year used a similar thematic backbone to build something entertaining on top while finding layers to examine it further, here the themes are simply spelled out in these conversations. Subplots, a potential romance and Charles’s unresolved trauma, are introduced but all in favor of spelling out more themes on their own, each reduced to another way of hammering home the film’s message (the love interest outright yells that the main character is abandoning his heritage). Some exchanges are well written, the strongest being one that leaves Dafoe in the dark, but repetition sets in once it becomes clear this is all the film has to offer.
Breaking up the dialogue are glimpses of horror that the marketing will surely lean on, but they are conventional nightmare visions that never truly frighten.
What keeps the film watchable is the dynamic between the two leads. Watching Dafoe and Hawkins play off one another is rewarding in itself, even if it never reaches the intensity it seems to promise. In the end, The Man in My Basement offers an intriguing premise that never escapes its tight confines. Strong work from Hawkins and Dafoe can only carry it so far.
This is part of Reviews On Reels TIFF 2025 Coverage. Due to the hectic rhythm of a film festival, it may be tweaked in the future.
Still courtesy of TIFF.