The Man in My Basement review – Willem Dafoe is an unsettling guest in eerie psychodrama

F eature first-timer Nadia Latif here directs a deeply strange parable, almost unlocatable in meaning and tone, adapted for the screen by Walter Mosley from his own 2004 novel. It appears to be a metaphor for racism and capitalism, for exploitation and for the historically hidden violence built into the foundations of ownership. Yet how exactly the metaphor works is unclear; it is like a labyrinth in which characters and audience can get disoriented. The final shot shows someone reading Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. I found myself thinking of Zadie Smith’s essay on Jordan Peele’s Get Out in which she references Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

The setting is the 90s, in which half-heard stories on the TV news about Rwanda and OJ have an unstressed racial dimension. We are i