If there is one thing that should be a rule in movies and in life, it is this: if a deceived Willem Dafoe is knocking on your door with a scary smile to offer you a suspicious amount of money to rent your basement, say no, lock the doors, throw your card and never talk to it.
Unfortunately, for the troubles of Corey Hawkins, Charles in “The man in my subsoil” of Nadia Latif, he does not take into account all the alarm ringtones which is triggered in his head and proceeds to the mystery of Dafoe. He then moves towards something more heavily existing: racism, history, morality and the meaning of life itself.
It is a promising configuration with some dark sensations to have. Hawkins and Dafoe just go there when the film is trying to sink his teeth into deeper ideas. Unfortunately, this pseudo-horror film very quickly lacks steam and any deeper sense.
From the moment we meet Charles, as he drinks with his friends and begins to stir things when one of them tries to show him a hard love by encouraging him to come together, Hawkins is able to authentically capture the many competing emotions that push him to the limit. He cries a recent loss while dealing with repercussions of his own actions which alienated him from most of the people around him. But the film soon reveals that it is as tortured as Charles, twist in knots and lose sight of all authentic tension by throwing everything it can on the wall.
Based on the novel of the same name of Walter Mosley, who also co-written the script, so much happens in “Man in my basement”. On the screen, cycling through the same sequence of frightening nightmarish after the fear of the nightmare, we realize the little weight of these sequences. Each empty bump in the night lands with a thud. Even a terrifying dog that becomes crucial for the film has a worse bark than its bite.
The film is not without potentially interesting provocations, although there are so many empty sequences built around a shock for good. From a bizarre masturbation scene to a lot of Dafoe and fecal matter (fortunately it is separated), the film has a lot that can make you wiggle – or fold with folds of what is hidden in darkness. But you would be better served by going directly to the source – the novel itself – instead of a dispersed interpretation.
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