The Man in My Basement
Writers: Nadia Latif and Walter Mosley
Director: Nadia Latif
Cast: Corey Hawkins, Willem Dafoe, Anna Diop
It feels like such a simple concept to absorb, but sometimes it's important to remind yourself — and everyone else in the pop culture space — that ideas and stories are two different things. An idea can lead to a story, sure, and a story can contain a multitude of ideas that intertwine, inform one another, and enrich the narrative. They are irrevocably tied together, but they are two different things that, at their best, work together.
I mention this because the right idea can often be the thing that gets you in the door for a story. Once you're there, though, you find that the story itself is faint, leaving the hook of the idea to carry things for far too long, until it all crumbles. In these cases, it's important to note the distinction between idea and story, and while the new Hulu original film The Man in My Basement begins with a strong version of the former, it can never quite find the latter despite lots of solid filmmaking craft.
Based on the novel of the same name by Walter Mosley, who co-wrote the screenplay with first-time feature director Nadia Latif, the idea that propels the front half of The Man in My Basement is intriguing and laced with tantalizing possibilities. The film picks up on Charles (Corey Hawkins), a lonely, adrift young man living in his family's ancestral home in Sag Harbor. With his mother gone and his life aimless, Charles is under threat of the bank foreclosing on the home his family's owned for eight generations, and he doesn't know how to pull himself out of this tight spot. His only recourse seems to be trying to sell off any antiques, including possibly priceless African masks, to local curator Narciss (Anna Diop), who encourages him to try to hold on to his family's heritage.
Charles' apparent savior arrives unexpectedly when a man named Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) knocks on his door. A polite businessman type whose motives are his own, Bennet offers Charles what sounds like a ludicrous proposition: He would like to rent Charles' basement at a rate of $1,000 per day for a little more than two months. What's he doing down there? Why Charles' house? When the money's that good, does Charles care?
I'm not going to tell you what Bennet actually wants with the basement, but that's a great hook, right? Willem Dafoe shows up at your door, smiling warmly, offering the solution to all your problems if you just let him crash in your cellar for a bit? What could possibly go wrong? And that's before you consider the power dynamics at work in the whole arrangement. Charles represents a Black family that's been part of the fabric of America since its inception, a proud group of people who celebrated the life they'd built despite the specter of white oppression. Now, a rich white man is swooping in seemingly not to snatch it all from Charles, but to save it. What's really going on there?
There are a lot of different ways this could go, and the chief problem with The Man in My Basement is not that it's bereft of ideas on where to take its narrative, but that it seems to want to do all of them at the same time, crammed into one two-hour block. It wants to be a film about power dynamics, and race, and survivor's guilt, and disillusion with the American dream, and the deep, deep scars of oppression and racism, and what atonement looks like for each of us. It also just wants to be a fun thriller about a man with a secret who imposes said secret on another person with the promise of money, With all of this and more trying to fit into that basement, things get crowded very quickly.
Which isn't to say there's nothing about the film to enjoy. Dafoe and Hawkins both approach the film with an eye toward vulnerability, subtlety, and genuine commitment to the emotional weight of the subject. No one is phoning this thing in, and when Hawkins and Dafoe are across from each other in that basement, the film really starts to sing. It's enough to almost make you long for a version of this story that's a chamber piece, a one-act play set in a single cold, dark room. They're giving their all to this material, so even when The Man in My Basement doesn't quite work, it is at the very least watchable and propulsive.
As a first-time director, Latif also shows strong instincts for composition, tone, and memorable imagery. Though it's almost always in thriller territory, The Man in My Basement occasionally leans hard into the horror world, and it's here that the director is stretching her wings to the greatest effect, giving us glimpses of the pain behind the warmth of an old New England home. It's a well-shot, well-paced film, even if its twists and moments of thematic emphasis often feel scattershot.
There's a lot to appreciate about The Man in My Basement, from the sheer weight of the talent involved to its willingness to really get down there in the dirt and the muck with its subject matter. It's a brave film, one that's willing to go just about anywhere, but all of its searching for the right note amid its flurry of ideas means that it ends up being only about the ideas, and not so much about the characters and the story. It's a prime example of a good idea that can never quite rise to the level of a good narrative, and that leaves it in a frustrating cinematic purgatory, neither good nor bad, lost in the flurry of its own ambition.
The Man in My Basement is in select theaters Sept. 12, and arrives on Hulu Sept. 26.
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