If there is one thing that should be a rule in movies and in life, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for Corey Hawkins\u2019 troubled Charles in Nadia Latif\u2019s \u201cThe Man in My Basement,\u201d he does not heed all the alarm bells going off in his head and proceeds to let Dafoe\u2019s mystery man in. The reasons for this poor decision soon reveal themselves as having to do with more practical motivations \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
More from TheWrap<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Based on the novel of the same name by Walter Mosley, who also co-wrote the screenplay, there\u2019s so much going on in \u201cThe Man in My Basement.\u201d 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\u2019s worse than its bite.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 or squint at what\u2019s hiding in the darkness. But you would be better served by going straight to the source \u2014 the novel itself \u2014 instead of a scattered interpretation.<\/p>\n Read all of our Toronto Film Festival coverage here.<\/p>\n The post \u2018The Man in My Basement\u2019 Review: Willem Dafoe and Corey Hawkins Play Mind Games in a Scattered Horror Film<\/a> appeared first on TheWrap<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If there is one thing that should be a rule in movies and in life, it\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1956684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[363697,363836,363698,309391],"class_list":["post-2001254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-corey-hawkins","tag-deeper-meaning","tag-the-man-in-my-basement","tag-willem-dafoe"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Ryan-Reynolds-Dwayne-Johnson-Tessa-Thompson-and-More-Set-Panels.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2001254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1956684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2001254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2001254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2001254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/div>\n