Would you let just anybody live in your home? What if they were in the basement, out of sight out of mind, and offered to pay? That’s the dilemma Corey Hawkins faces with Willem Dafoe in the new thriller, The Man In My Basement, based on the 2004 novel by Walter Mosley.
Directed by Nadia Latif who co-wrote the screenplay with Mosley, the film is about a down-on-his-luck Black man about to lose his family home due to overwhelming debt. He gets a lifeline when a peculiar white businessman offers to rent out his basement for the summer, and pay off his debts. Crazy stuff happens, which should be expected because…I mean, it’s Willem Dafoe. Have you seen the characters he plays?
SYNOPSIS: In the African American neighborhood of Sag Harbor, New York, Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) is out of work, out of luck and on the verge of foreclosure on his ancestral home. A knock on the door from a mysterious businessman, Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe), brings a bizarre and lucrative proposition; rent his dusty stand-up basement out for the summer and receive enough money to clear his debts for good. Once Charles accepts, he finds himself led down a terrifying path that confronts his family’s ghosts and locks the men in a terrifying puzzle, at the heart of it race, the source of their traumas and the root of all evil.
Hawkins and Dafoe are joined by Anna Diop, Jonathan Ajayi, Gershwyn Eustache Jnr., Pamela Nomvete, and Tamara Lawrance.
The Man In My Basement hits Hulu this Fall.
