The Man in My Basement Won’t Get Out of its Own Way

Typically, when one can say that a film benefits from a strong sense of theme, subtext and powerful performances, it’s in service of a rave review. All of these things are indeed true of Hulu’s The Man in My Basement, the directorial debut of writer-director Nadia Latif, adapted from the 2004 novel by Walter Mosley, which premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival. But despite the thematic and metaphorical richness of the text, and the way it commands one’s attention in the moments where its dual stars face off in a series of tense exchanges, the adaptation of Mosley’s novel simultaneously feels at a loss in terms of what kind of tone it wants to project, clumsily bolting itself on in various places to the iconography of supernatural horror without much deftness or logic in its embrace of that aesthetic. For far too much of its bloated runtime, it becomes an incomprehensible slideshow of trauma and weakly executed horror imagery, only occasionally revealing the far more effective, character-driven psychological thriller it’s clearly yearning to be.

Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) is a black man living alone in a handsome but run-down old house that has been within his Sag Harbor, NY-based family for eight generations. Only now, there really is no more “family” to speak of–Charles dropped out of college years earlier to care for both his dying mother and uncle, and then found himself figuratively and literally “stuck” in this place, shuffling around as it slowly moulders around him, the literal graves of his ancestors looming ever higher in the backyard. He is the last scion of a family that has withered and failed, and he bears all that burden of responsibility for the unrealized dreams of a lineage that stretches back to western Africa, haunted by the implication of the slave trade. All that remains of the family legacy is Charles and the house, and the latter may not be in his possession much longer: Charles can’t make the mortgage payments, nor is anyone in the community willing to help him after a workplace incident in which Charles seemingly burned all his goodwill. His doom feels palpable, and even the friends he antagonizes seem to have accepted it, effectively paying him their symbolic goodbyes.

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So yeah, it’s understandable that Charles is ultimately agreeable when an affluent, vaguely European weirdo shows up at his door, saying that he wants to rent the basement of the home for the next few months for a huge sum of money that our protagonist can’t possibly pass up. Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) is a total mystery, some kind of self-made businessman who no doubt has some kind of ulterior motive. Even a character as desperate as Charles must have some inkling of the style of fiction in which such a scenario must inevitably occur. Well-dressed and eloquent white men don’t just show up on your doorstep and offer to pay off your mortgage in exchange for residing in a dank basement; not without being able to extract more value than they’re giving up. Bennet as much as tells Charles this to his face. So what does he really want?

This is an exceedingly simple thriller setup, made more complex by Charles’ other efforts to raise funds, which leads him into emotionally steeped philosophical conflict with the ghosts of his own history. He looks, for instance, to sell a wide range of family heirlooms and artifacts to local antiques appraiser and historian/romantic interest Narciss Gully (Anna Diop), who is deeply uncomfortable with the thought of essentially helping Charles to auction off his family legacy, even if he now finds himself wanting to symbolically wash his hands of much of it. This becomes a major theme of The Man in My Basement: The responsibility of being a steward to one’s legacy, balanced by the more practical, inescapable need to thrive and survive in the modern day by any means necessary. Which takes precedence, and how much do we really owe to the memory of the dead?

Unfortunately, The Man in My Basement struggles as a film adaptation in uniting this kind of story about historical family trauma, racism, power imbalances and guilt with so much of the more generic horror imagery it falls back on, and the engrossing confrontations between Hawkins and Dafoe are nearly wasted by far too much dawdling in more uninspired genre territory. It’s as if Latif or the film’s producers didn’t trust that the central dyad was actually compelling enough to anchor the film, and they responded by loading it with disconnected and barely cogent horror tropes instead.

This often makes The Man in My Basement feel like two different films playing in tandem, neatly segregated within different tiers of the house. On the basement level, where Dafoe resides, it can be a crackling thriller that revolves around the verbal sparring matches held between the two, vacillating from surprisingly warm candor to disturbingly profound admissions of barbarism. But on the top floors of the house, where Charles is so often alone as the only person in the frame, the film feels much more like some kind of wan, cliche-blighted supernatural haunted house yarn, wherein this man is forever stalked by the revenants of the family he failed. Over and over, it employs the same tools, most notably the “he encounters some frightening imagery and then wakes up from a dream” dodge, although occasionally the film simply gives up on even that basic conceit and simply cuts straight from horror imagery right into its next shot of Hawkins going about his daily business. Iconic horror scenes, such as the sink from Poltergeist are recreated guilelessly, and the film tortures its slow-burn question of whether literally anything we’ve seen from Charles’ perspective is “real” far past the point of interest. In the end, it doesn’t really matter–everything that occurs when Charles is on his own can safely be chalked up to reflections of his trauma and guilt, but it’s the way these sequences are carelessly stitched together–and the sheer overabundance of them in a film that should have been significantly shorter–that cause them to increasingly sputter. Charles ends up simply drifting from one sad or disturbing sight to the next like a man in a fugue, and the film can’t keep its attention on anything for more than a minute. And all the while, Dafoe is waiting patiently down in the basement in Movie B, waiting for the narrative to rejoin him.

This is all a shame, because Hawkins and Dafoe are both genuinely excellent here, especially whenever the film has them hunker down across from each other to probe for the truth of what they’re both really doing in this place, with energy that swings from coy to confessional. Hawkins is a truly raw, jangled nerve in The Man in My Basement, a man in the process of confronting his worst tendencies who may be nursing a death wish. He often has the energy and posture of an addict in withdrawals, but it’s hard to say what he would be addicted to, beyond guilt and self-castigation. Dafoe, on the other hand, is as slippery and commanding a screen presence as you would expect him to be, although we disappointingly never quite get the handle on “Anniston Bennet” that it feels like we should. The viewer might eventually be able to grasp some of what makes him tick, in an ending that is half-satisfying while attempting to reclaim both characters to some degree, but it feels like even the same conclusion would have been rendered richer by a narrative that hewed closer to this odd relationship … which is also the relationship being used to sell the film in its marketing. Instead, we simply spend too much time wandering, and Nadia Latif seems to spread her attention too thin, in search of a way to give voice to more themes and topics than this screenplay can genuinely support.

The Man in My Basement attempts to bite off more than it can chew in its desire to offer commentary–particularly complex racial commentary–in a package that spends most of its time in a series of redundant, not particularly inspired horror sequences that sadly feel plucked from better films. Although it comes revving to life when Hawkins and Dafoe share the screen, the film seemingly fails to recognize its own strongest material, ultimately feeling as unfinished as the dank room where Dafoe waits in the darkness.

Director: Nadia Latif
Writers: Nadia Latif, Walter Mosley
Stars: Corey Hawkins, Willem Dafoe, Anna Dip, Tamara Lawrance
Release date: Sept. 12, 2025 (U.S. theaters)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.