The Man in My Basement (2025)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Cellar Lore

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

While it sometimes veers off track and loses focus, Nadia Latif's strange thriller The Man in My Basement has an electrifying cat-and-mouse conversation at its center, and grapples with powerful and relevant themes.

Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) is stuck. He lives in a home in Sag Harbor that has been in his family for eight generations. But he also lost his job due to stealing, and now can't get another one. And the bank has begun to hound him. One day a white man, Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) arrives at his door and asks to rent Charles's basement for 65 days, for which he will pay $65,000 in total. Charles immediately says no.

He begins poking around the basement and finds some old family artifacts. His best friend Ricky (Jonathan Ajayi), helps him get in touch with Narciss Gully (Anna Diop), an expert in antiques and African-American history. He tells her he wants to sell the items, but learns that it will take months before he sees any money.

Desperate, Charles calls Anniston and agrees to let him rent the basement. Charles then gets the shock of his life when he discovers that Anniston has constructed a cage and has locked himself inside.

Based on a 2004 novel by legendary author Walter Mosley — who co-adapted the screenplay with director Latif — The Man in My Basement is only the second Mosley book to make it to the big screen, after the detective story Devil in a Blue Dress, but this is an entirely different animal.

This movie has surrealist touches, including strange hallucinations experienced by Charles, and certainly Dafoe locked in a cage recalls his recent, weird, trapped-in-an-apartment-movie Inside.

That's all well and good, but the movie gets interesting when Charles and Anniston get down to talking, to really talking. Their conversations, while wily and evasive, cover such themes as good-and-evil, power-versus-powerlessness, and White privilege and systemic racism. Charles's tense encounters with Narciss help underline some of these topics, as they argue about what to do with the family artifacts.

Truthfully, the movie doesn't quite seem to know what to do with Charles when he's not with these other characters, and there are perhaps a few too many moments of him seemingly going slowly off the rails, but that aside, The Man in My Basement is still a movie worth visiting and worth pondering.