THE STORY – When a mysterious man (Willem Dafoe) approaches Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) to rent his basement for a generous sum, Blakey is drawn into a chilling reality involving his own family’s hidden history in Nadia Latif’s adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel.
THE CAST – Corey Hawkins, Willem Dafoe, Anna Diop & Tamara Lawrance
THE TEAM – Nadia Latif (Director/Writer) & Walter Mosley (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 115 Minutes
The opening of “The Man in My Basement” is a masterstroke of quiet horror – a slow, creeping camera moves through an ancestral home, setting an eerie tone, thick with dread and memory. However, what begins as a potent, atmospheric character study of grief and identity quickly devolves into a maze of conflicting metaphors, cryptic motivations, and philosophical gestures that never quite cohere. Directed by Nadia Latif and co-written by Walter Mosley, who wrote the novel of the same name, the film brims with compelling ideas. But the problem is that it has too many of them.
Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins, delivering affecting, quietly broken work) is the kind of man who has been living at the bottom of a well for a long time. Jobless, spiraling, and clinging to a decaying home passed down through eight generations of his family, Charles is under mounting pressure from friends and family to do something with his life before the bank reclaims the house. But Charles isn’t just lazy, as his frustrated friends accuse; he’s paralyzed by loss, depression, and a deep, unresolved guilt tied to the deaths of his mother and uncle. The house, in many ways, has become his prison – one filled with memories, ghosts, and not enough food in the fridge.
Enter Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe), a strange, mysterious figure who knocks on Charles’s door with a baffling request: to rent his cobweb-ridden, dead-raccoon-infested basement for 65 days at $1,000 a day. Why Charles’s house? Why him? That question looms large, and the eventual answer is… well, let’s just say it’s pretty convoluted.
Anniston claims to work in “reclamations,” which at first sounds like some vague, bureaucratic real estate role but becomes increasingly disturbing as you consider its symbolic implications. For African Americans, “reclamation” is a sacred and ongoing process: reclaiming stolen culture, history, identity, and land. It’s an act of resistance against centuries of erasure. So when Anniston, a privileged white man with no known roots, calls his work “reclamation,” it reeks of irony or theft. Charles calls it what it is: stealing. Anniston shrugs, calls it globalization, outsourcing, the “cost of doing business.” This is one of the film’s most charged ideas, and to its credit, it doesn’t shy away from the discomfort. But it also doesn’t clarify what, exactly, Anniston is doing. His job, his motives, and his moral philosophy all get buried under murky dialogue and cryptic monologues that Dafoe, as talented as he is, can’t quite make legible.
And that’s a significant flaw. Anniston is clearly intended to be a mystery box, a figure who inverts power dynamics by building a prison cell in Charles’s basement and locking himself inside. But instead of revealing anything profound, the character becomes more of a philosophical gimmick. The film hints that this is all penance for his privilege, or a spiritual quest for isolation and redemption. But the logic is muddled. Why 65 days? Why secrecy? Why Charles? Is this performance art? Psychological torture? A white savior complex? The vagueness eventually becomes exhausting.
Still, the dynamic between the two men remains intriguing. Charles, burdened by familial expectations and emotional inertia, is contrasted with Anniston, a man desperate to erase himself from his past. As Anniston withdraws into his cage, Charles is forced to confront his own – not made of bars, but of grief, guilt, and disconnection. There’s some rich irony here: one man cages himself to be free, while the very weight of his inheritance cages the other.
That inheritance takes literal form when Charles finds centuries-old items in his basement, including African masks tied to his heritage. In one stunning sequence, the camera lingers over these items laid out across his living room, revealing the quiet, unspoken wealth Charles has been living on top of. But instead of honoring it, he considers selling it – heritage turned into merchandise. It’s a gutting metaphor for how generational trauma and cultural value are often commodified just to survive.
And yet, the film doesn’t always earn the depth it gestures toward. The dialogue is often powerful and poetic, and there are fascinating scenes – monologues from Dafoe, ghostly apparitions seen by Charles – that gesture at bigger questions about race, history, guilt, and legacy. But they’re strung together in a way that feels occasionally incoherent. It’s as if the film is having an intellectual crisis of its own, unsure if it wants to be a ghost story, a psychological drama, or a symbolic treatise on colonial aftermath.
There’s also a sense that the film is longer than it needs to be. A good 30 minutes could’ve been trimmed without losing its mood or message. By the time the ending arrives with a rushed and oddly optimistic tonal shift, the emotional and thematic payoff feels unearned. That said, the final shot of Charles reading “The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon is a thoughtful touch. Fanon’s work is about the dehumanizing effects of colonization and the urgent need for self-liberation. For Charles, who has been struggling to define his own worth beyond property and pain, it signals a beginning – a reclaiming of self, not through money or preservation of a house, but through awareness that wealth is more than money.
Ultimately, “The Man in My Basement” is a film about ghosts – both literal and metaphorical. It wants to speak to the hauntings of history, the burden of Black inheritance, and the strange ways guilt manifests. But the film’s ambition often outpaces its clarity. At its best, it captures the surreal pain of being tethered to a past you never asked for. At its worst, it’s a philosophical fog.
