TIFF Movie Review: "The Man in My Basement" is a Brilliant Film Debut by Director Nadia Latif
Charles Blakey is out of work, poor, and owns his mother’s ancestral home in Sag Harbor, New York. He’s also taken out a mortgage on the house, and behind on his payments. As the bank accelerates foreclosure on the house, Charles meets Anniston Bennet and the possibility of salvation blooms.
Bennet rents the basement of Blakey’s house for sixty-five days and pays a thousand dollars a day. This is a dream come true for Blakey, but the day after Bennet settles into the basement, the promise of hope comes with many strings attached.
Blakey is shocked to see Bennet in a prison cell of his own making. Initially he wants the man out, but the need for money, and Bennet’s charismatic nature carries the day, and Blakey agrees to be the captor.
Days pass, and Blakey soon learns that Anniston Bennet will probe the depths of his soul and force him to confront the past which haunts Blakey and keeps him from moving on in his life.
The Man in My Basement is simply remarkable. Being fused with horror, psychological terror, and the need to preserve family history, the movie is a tightly compacted battle of wits between two men who are at the end of their ropes in surviving the conflicts that life has thrown at them.
Willem Dafoe is mesmerizing as Anniston Bennet. The audience is aware from the first moment that Dafoe is seen in the movie that his character is not a good person. For most of the tale the audience will be genuinely terrorized by what Bennet does, even though he is confined to a prison cell in the basement. Dafoe gets little room, except through his incredible talent to project a larger-than-life character through laser-like dissections using his outstanding ability to target his words like projectile missiles. Anniston Bennet is one of the most terrifying characters on screen this year.
Corey Hawkins plays Charles Blakey. Hawkins at first makes Blakey the typical lost soul who has stumbled in life. He is the average everyday guy, that even though he has friends, and a budding relationship with Narciss Gully (Anna Diop) the audience knows that Charles Blakey is not a good guy. Hawkins gives ample evidence to show early on that Charles is a jerk, but it is the outstanding level of depth that Corey Hawkins spends in the first act of the film breaking down little by little as Blakey has come to realize what a contemptible person he is, and the fact that his future is hopeless.
Hawkins has a delicate balance to portray on screen. He’s the captor of Bennet, but really the one person who is serving a prison term is Charles Blakey. He’s metaphorically trapped in keeping the family home in the family, and he is alone and doesn’t have the money, or help to keep the family dream alive.
Director Nadia Latif has assembled an incredible cast that gives life to this story of survival. Latif’s buildout of the Walter Mosley original work allows the director to tell a story about the loss of home, and the safety and salvation of one’s home. We watch Charles and his family history teeter on the edge of ruin, we hear in the background the news about the Rwanda civil war, and the OJ Simpson trial, and the audience is left to wonder, why is it, that a home that has been in the same family for generations could be repossessed by the bank. Why is Anniston Bennet able to accelerate the foreclosure process on Blakey so that he will be forced to do what Bennet wants.
The Man in My Basement is a story of survival and bad men who need to reconcile with their actions, but the themes of racism, prejudice, and disenfranchisement that connect the many threads of the story are as important now as they are in the 90’s setting of the movie.
What better way to show the exploitation or neglect of the needs of people than the show trial that was the OJ Simpson murder case, or the world’s abandonment of Rwanda when millions were killed.
This is a lengthy movie that has stunning twists in tone and metrics of fear. To anyone who has had dark moments in their own life, they will empathize with Charles and cover their eyes at the horror that comes. The fear and pain that Hawkins brings to the screen as Charles is all leading to one resolution.
Latif has left the ending open ended, one for the audience to make up with their own mind, but while this may cause some confusion as the credits role, one thing that is for certain, The Man in My Basement has shown a promising filmmaker has arrived in the form of Nadia Latif, and Corey Hawkins should be bound for stardom with this career making performance.