One of the more amusing filmmaking exercises of the last few years was 2023’s Inside, which depicted the steady unraveling of a man who becomes inadvertently trapped inside a luxury penthouse apartment he was attempting to burglarize. Set entirely in a single location, the film is most memorable for gifting a notable showcase to Willem Dafoe, who portrayed the ensnared man and is virtually the only character to appear on screen. While Inside didn’t make any headway in reinventing the wheel, it made for a compelling enough sit thanks entirely to Dafoe, whose trademark gravelly voice and striking screen presence did wonders to carry the project across the finish line. Now, in 2025, there’s The Man in My Basement, which similarly promises another tale of Dafoe confined to a single location for much of the film’s duration, though this time he’s not alone. Based on a 2004 novel by Walter Mosley, The Man in My Basement is the feature debut of Nadia Latif, striving to make her mark with a thematically dense work. The film offers many provocative ideas, and there’s a typically strong Dafoe performance at the center of it all, but the reality of watching it is far less enthralling, as the film’s near two-hour runtime winds up becoming an enormous liability, gradually dissipating any tension or intrigue like air leaking out of a balloon.
The basement in question is attached to a house owned by Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins), a man currently struggling to make ends meet. Having recently lost his mother, Charles is the eighth and last of his generation growing up in his family home in Sag Harbor Hills, a predominantly Black community in New York. As bills and property taxes pile up, and with no luck in finding any job opportunities, Charles is having a difficult time keeping his head above water, while his combative behavior slowly alienates the remaining family and friends he has left. His only viable option seems to be selling his house to the bank, which would absolve his debts but force him to lose the only thing of value he has left in his life. With the entire world against him, it seems not only serendipitous but also downright miraculous that Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) enters his life, toting an unusual proposition: if Charles allows him to rent out the basement of his home, he will receive a payment of $65,000, with nearly half of that paid up front. Initially rebuffing the stranger’s offer, Charles is eventually left with no choice but to accept, welcoming Anniston into his home. However, after the first night passes by, Charles awakens to a harrowing discovery: Anniston has locked himself in an elaborate cage system within the dwelling, and will now solely depend on Charles for food, water, and electricity to survive his stay, further rocking the world of a man backed into a corner, plagued with his own demons.
Though the title and premise foreground Dafoe’s presence in the film, Anniston does not enter Charles’ home until the 30-minute mark. Latif, who co-adapted the screenplay with Mosley, spends an inordinate amount of time establishing Charles’ strife, painting a portrait of a man who is down but not quite out. Gas is low, groceries are sparse, nobody’s hiring, and the bank is threatening foreclosure, with the burden of existence drawing real-world parallels from those attempting to navigate a poisoned economy. Charles is also in possession of many ancestral artifacts from West Africa, meeting with art dealer Narciss (Anna Diop) to see about selling off his valuable collection of masks, toying with the idea of parting with priceless heirlooms for any sort of financial reprieve, however momentary it may be. The Man in My Basement tackles race, history, legacy, culture, and guilt, but as the film (slowly) marches on, one can’t help but feel that the overbearing whole is less than the sum of its grab bag of ideas, as Latif seems content only to hat tip to their presence, which fails to pay off these themes with any sort of convincing closure.
Thankfully, there is the Dafoe of it all, with the actor still completely magnetic to watch, even when confined to a 10-by-10 cell block for the bulk of the film. He’s matched well by Hawkins, and The Man in My Basement is at its absolute best when the film hunkers down with these two men, squaring off with intense scenes of interrogation as Anniston’s true motives are doled out piecemeal. Mosley is an acclaimed crime novelist (his most famous work is arguably his Easy Rawlins series, which kicked off with The Devil in a Blue Dress), but this film feels more theatrical by design — those going in blind would be likely to assume this derived from a stage play rather than a mystery novel. Part of the problem also lies in Latif’s confused direction: The Man in My Basement feints at being a ghost story, a haunted house picture, and a knotty psychological thriller, but it ultimately crystallizes into none of the above or any strange amalgam of all three, taking the cheap way out with a limp ending that does not bring the story to a satisfying close. Dafoe is as reliable a presence as ever, but The Man in My Basement squanders its intriguing premise, bottoming out long before the picture ends.
DIRECTOR: Nadia Latif; CAST: Willem Dafoe, Corey Hawkins, Anna Diop, Jonathan Ajayi; DISTRIBUTOR: Hulu; IN THEATERS: September 12; STREAMING: September 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 55 min.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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