If there is one thing that should be a rule in movies and in life, it’s this: if a deceptively friendly Willem Dafoe comes knocking at your door with a creepy smile to offer you a suspiciously large amount of cash to rent your basement, say no, lock the doors, throw away his card, and never speak to him again.
Unfortunately for Corey Hawkins‘ troubled Charles in Nadia Latif’s “The Man in My Basement,” he does not heed all the alarm bells going off in his head and proceeds to let Dafoe’s mystery man in. The reasons for this poor decision soon reveal themselves as having to do with more practical motivations — namely that Charles is broke and needs the money. It then shifts into something more existentially fraught: Racism, history, morality, and the meaning of life itself.
It’s a promising setup with some dark thrills to be had. Hawkins and Dafoe go at it just as the film tries to sink its teeth into deeper ideas. Unfortunately, this pseudo-horror film very quickly runs out of steam, and out of any deeper meaning.
From the moment we meet Charles, as he drinks with his friends and starts stirring things up when one of them tries to show him tough love by encouraging him to get his life together, Hawkins is able to authentically capture the many competing emotions that are pushing him to the edge. He’s grieving a recent loss while also dealing with the repercussions of his own actions that have alienated him from most of the people around him. But the film soon reveals it is as tortured as Charles, twisting itself into knots and losing sight of any genuine tension by throwing everything it possibly can at the wall.
Based on the novel of the same name by Walter Mosley, who also co-wrote the screenplay, there’s so much going on in “The Man in My Basement.” On screen, cycling through the same sequence of nightmare scare after nightmare scare, one realizes how little weight these sequences. Each empty bump in the night lands with a dull thud. Even a terrifying dog that becomes crucial to the film has a bark that’s worse than its bite.
The film is not without some potentially interesting provocations, though there are just as many empty sequences built around shock for the sake of it. From a bizarre masturbation scene to a whole lot of Dafoe and fecal matter (these are thankfully separate), the film has plenty that may make you squirm — or squint at what’s hiding in the darkness. But you would be better served by going straight to the source — the novel itself — instead of a scattered interpretation.
