Critic Reviews

It’s an eerie, disquieting experience.

It’s a discomforting film and a potentially eerie experience for all viewers. The villain appears to be personal compromise and the moral lapses ignored on a daily basis in the name of getting by.

It wants to speak to the hauntings of history, the burden of Black inheritance, and the strange ways guilt manifests. But the film’s ambition often outpaces its clarity. At its best, it captures the surreal pain of being tethered to a past you never asked for. At its worst, it’s a philosophical fog.

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.

Though The Man In My Basement juggles a few too many ideas, Nadia Latif has crafted an unnerving thriller with dynamite performances from leads Willem Dafoe and Corey Hawkins. 

The devil isn’t just on the screen, it’s in the details, and Latif’s film can’t pull those together.

Rife with symbolic weight, the action is thematically jumbled, and worse, it takes so long establishing its scenario that it never develops a sense of urgency and madness.

Watching these two performers grapple with a text as rich as Mosley’s only leads one back to wishing the film around them trusted them enough to take more risks and to really go somewhere other than the first floor.

A great cast and patience will prove only somewhat rewarding, even if the journey to get there is shaky and more than a bit confusing.

The film proves at least somewhat compelling, with director Latif providing enough tension and chilling visuals to keep viewers engaged.