Nadia Latif's feature debut, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, is too constrained by the literal to access the symbolic power of its story.
The psychological thriller "The Man in My Basement" adapts Walter Mosley's 2004 novel of the same name, but offers little in the way of intriguing psychology or suspense. Set in the quaint town of Sag Harbor, Long Island, a historically African-American community, the film follows a young Black slacker whose inherited house becomes the setting for a middle-aged white man's strange experiment, while also tackling themes of guilt, trauma, and racial animosity that quickly lead nowhere.
Director: Nadia Latif
Writers: Walter Mosley, Nadia Latif
Stars: Corey Hawkins, Willem Dafoe, Anna Diop
Mosley co-writes the script with first-time director Nadia Latif, who shows tremendous promise from the start, capturing the disoriented young Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) as he antagonizes one of his friends for no good reason. Blakey exudes a simmering rage and self-loathing that Latif captures with unpredictable camera movement. Yet these introductory moments are as energetic as the film gets.
Blakey, having inherited his mother's isolated house and all her belongings, has incurred considerable debt. But facing imminent foreclosure, a mysterious and wealthy Connecticut businessman named Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) knocks on the door the next morning with the strange but lucrative offer to rent Blakey's spacious basement for a considerable sum for several months, no questions asked.
Blakey, still looking for work and with a bad reputation around town, finally accepts the offer. He digs his mother's belongings out from under the house, only to rediscover ancient West African artifacts—ceremonial masks that hold mysterious secrets—that have been in his family for generations. Before Bennet's arrival, he sends large crates of secret materials like a count from Transylvania, and meanwhile, Blakey tries to put a price on the various antiquities he finds (with the help of an attractive well-known art dealer, played by Alice Diop). But with Bennet's arrival, things take a turn for the strange when the wealthy tycoon builds himself a cell in the basement, in an apparent act of meditative penance that forces Blakey to reverse the traditional power dynamic.
It takes a considerable portion of the film's nearly two-hour running time for these pieces to finally fall into place, or for the story's setting to become clear (it's set in the mid-1990s). After this, much of the dialogue between its two protagonists focuses on figuring out why Bennet has become Blakey's prisoner or what he expects of him. The answers, however, are often too abstract to build a linear plot around. “The Man in My Basement” isn’t even remotely the kind of esoteric psychological study that could lend itself to the absurdity it offers.
In a 2004 interview with NPR, Mosley claimed that his original book was an attempt to “show an encounter between evil and innocence,” but even at its most symbolic, the film rarely draws representational power from its premise and remains too attached to the literal to achieve any kind of aesthetic takeoff. The aforementioned masks, for example, accelerate strange visions for Blakey, but the film’s rigid boundary between his dreams and his waking life undermines the tension of these sequences.
Dafoe is primarily responsible for explaining the underlying themes in long monologues. The actor performs them with aplomb, but the words revolve around ideas that never materialize visually. It certainly doesn't help that these exchanges in the gloomy basement rarely cohere visually, with shots that fit together awkwardly, leaving the scenes somewhere between the naturalistic and the disorienting. Beyond a certain point, Latif's numerous attempts to create atmosphere and mood through movement end with little subtext from which to draw information and come across as flourishes without substance.
Blakey's character seems like an attempt to weave all these disparate parts together, but his issues rarely lead to the psychological investigations that might make him a remotely magnetic protagonist. Hawkings, for his part, acts admirably, with a theatrical zest and unpredictability that the film rarely matches. The result is a story composed of numerous denouements and thematic conclusions, whose points don't seem meaningfully connected, and whose situational oddities rarely generate excitement or intrigue.
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