‘The Man In My Basement’ Movie Review: Hawkins and Dafoe Compel But Inert Two-Hander Under-Delivers
Photo from Andscape
From Jeremy Kibler
Based on Walter Mosley’s acclaimed 2004 novel of the same name, The Man in My Basement should have been titled, “Man, Get Out of My Basement.” An intriguing setup initially gives way to a few genre conventions, but rather than just settling as an obsession tale (or a racially charged version of Apt Pupil), this adaptation has loftier ambitions to convey ideas of class, race, and shifts in power. All of that could be worthwhile as a conversation starter (and the strong performances certainly help). As a socially conscious statement, it’s ambitious, but as a film, it’s inert and unsatisfying without much of a rewarding payoff.
Corey Hawkins (In the Heights) plays Charles Blakey, a Black man in 1994, Sag Harbor, New York. Financially burdened since the death of his mother, he’s still living in his family home, which has been passed down for seven generations. With no job and no prospects, he tries selling off African heritage tchotchkes and tribal masks as merchandise to pay the property taxes and the bills. Finally, as the bank is about to foreclose on the house, Charles answers a knock at his door with an unbeatable offer by a stranger named Anniston Bennett (Willem Dafoe), who asks to rent out Charles’ basement for a few months. $1K a day for 65 days is life-changing but very suspicious (and the man is played by Dafoe with an unsettling smile, so we know his intentions can’t be pure), but despite all of the alarm bells, Charles gives in to the arrangement. One morning, Charles goes down to the basement to find Anniston has locked himself in a cage. What kind of twisted master-and-servant game did Anniston have in mind? Is this some sort of Faustian transaction?
Right there, The Man in My Basement has our attention. Co-writing the script with author Mosley, Nadia Latif makes her feature directorial debut from thematically provocative source material. There’s something insidious going on with Anniston Bennett, and a symbolic German Shepherd seems to have a tracker on Charles, but it takes an awfully long time for anything to take shape and fall into place. On a visceral level, Latif does stage some creepy bumps in the night, and the intellectually thorny back-and-forth between Charles and Anniston lends some food for thought. It’s crisply photographed (with use for several split diopter shots during simple conversations) and very well-acted, but this mysterious exercise in trauma storytelling becomes a long tease of withholding and under-delivering.
If a pair of performers could make an increasingly heated two-hander compelling to watch, it’s Corey Hawkins and Willem Dafoe. Playing Charles as a broken man who’s at his lowest point but gets in his own way, Hawkins is able to draw us in while having a slippery quality about him. Dafoe, of course, gets the showier part with his dependably off-kilter presence but still plays a full spectrum of emotions as the cipher who is Anniston Bennett (what a name). They’re giving their all to the material, especially Dafoe who acts in his own fecal matter at one point, but it’s somehow not enough.
The Man in My Basement flirts with slow-burn psychological horror and even the supernatural, but it really ends up feeling like a lecture waxing philosophical on control and white guilt. It keeps us guessing, until we get tired of guessing.
Rating: 2/5
The Man in My Basement hits select theaters on September 12, 2025, followed by a streaming Hulu release on September 26, 2025.
