The psychological thriller “The Man in My Basement” adapts Walter Mosley’s 2004 novel of the same name, but yields little by way of intriguing psychology or thrills. Set in the quaint Long Island village of Sag Harbor — a historically African American community — it follows a young Black slacker whose inherited home becomes the venue for a middle-aged white man’s strange experiment, while gesturing at themes of guilt, trauma and racial animus that go nowhere anytime quick.
Mosley co-writes the screenplay alongside debuting director Nadia Latif, who shows immense promise early on, capturing the directionless young Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) as he antagonizes one of his pals for no good reason. There’s a simmering rage and self-loathing to Blakey, which Latif matches in the form of unpredictable camera motion, but these introductory moments are about as energetic as the movie ever gets.
Blakey, having inherited his mother’s isolated home and all her belongings, has taken on significant debt. But as the threat of foreclosure looms, a mysterious, wealthy businessman from Connecticut namd Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) comes knocking the next morning with the strange but lucrative offer to rent out Blakey’s spacious basement for a hefty cash sum for several months, no questions asked — or answered.
Blakey, who’s still in search of work and has an ill reputation around town, eventually accepts the offer. He clears out his mother’s belongings from under the house, only to re-discover ancient west African artifacts — ceremonial masks bearing mysterious secrets — that have been in his family for generations. Prior to Bennet’s stay, he sends ahead with large boxes of secret materials like a Transylvanian Count, and in the meantime, Blakey attempts to price the various antiques he finds (with the help of an alluring art dealer acquaintance, played by Alice Diop). But upon Bennet’s arrival, things take a turn for the bizarre, when the wealthy tycoon builds himself a prison cell in the basement, in an apparent act of meditative penance that forces Blakey into an inversion of traditional power dynamics.
It takes a considerable amount of the movie’s nearly two-hour runtime for these pieces to finally fall into place, or for the story’s setting to become clear (it takes place in the mid ‘90s). After this, much of the dialogue between its two lead characters is aimed at figuring out why Bennet has made himself Blakey’s prisoner, or what he wants from him. The answers, however, are often too abstract to build a linear plot around. “The Man in My Basement” isn’t nearly the kind of esoteric psychological study that might lend itself to the kind of absurdism on offer.
In a 2004 interview with NPR, Mosley claimed his original book was an attempt to “show a meeting between evil and innocence,” but even at its most symbolic, the movie seldom draws representational power from its premise, and remains too tethered to the literal to achieve any form of aesthetic liftoff. The aforementioned masks, for instance, hasten strange visions for Blakey, but the film’s hard boundary between his dreams and waking life sap these sequences of all tension.
The underlying themes are mostly left for Dafoe to explain in lengthy monologues. The actor performs them with aplomb, but the words all circle ideas that never come to visual fruition. It certainly doesn’t help that these exchanges in the dingy basement rarely cohere in a visual sense, with shots fitting together awkwardly, leaving scenes in a noncommittal middle ground between naturalistic and disorienting. Beyond a point, Latif’s many attempts to create mood and atmosphere through movement end up with little subtext to draw from, and play like flourishes with no substance.
The character of Blakey plays like an attempt to weave all these disparate parts together, but his troubles seldom build to the kind of psychological investigations that might make him a remotely magnetic protagonist. Hawkings, for his part, performs admirably, with a stage-like gusto and unpredictability that the movie seldom matches. The result is a tale made up of numerous endpoints and thematic conclusions, whose dots don’t feel meaningfully connected, and whose situational oddities rarely yield excitement or intrigue. The film feels like it has things it wants to say about both personal trauma and Black history in the United States, but by the time its closing credits roll, it’s barely begun to say them.