“A haunted elegy of inheritance and repentance, where the sins of history echo in every room.”

As the years go by and I get older, I find myself thinking more often about the people I have known who are no longer alive. Maybe I’m overly sentimental, but these thoughts and memories can bring grief, pain, and a sense of longing for the past. Nadia Latif’s The Man in My Basement takes these intangible feelings and forms them into a beguiling and unsettling drama. Latif’s film is both a mysterious and tense family ghost story, and an acting bout between two men whose lives could not be more different yet who become, in their haunted similarity, disturbingly close.

Set in an African American neighborhood in Sag Harbor on Long Island, the film introduces us to Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins), a hapless man weighed down by debt ($68,000 on a family mortgage that somehow is not paid on his ancestral home) and by the quiet despair of unemployment and grief. His mother and uncle are gone, the cupboards nearly bare, and the home itself is now a burden he cannot shoulder. Hawkins embodies Charles with a physicality that emphasizes his exhaustion: a man adrift, rooted only by a house that feels as much curse as inheritance.

Into this void steps Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe), who arrives with a bizarre proposition: he wants to rent the basement of Charles’s home. Bennet is a man marked by history. He has committed atrocities in his past and now seeks an unlikely form of penance. “I need to be incarcerated by someone with black skin,” he states, a line that crystallizes the film’s audacious moral confrontation. Dafoe plays Bennet with a mixture of menace and vulnerability, an aging man whose privilege has shielded him but whose guilt gnaws with insatiable hunger.

The uneasy bond between Charles and Bennet becomes the film’s central duel. On the surface they could not be more different: a wealthy white man haunted by his past sins and a struggling black man tethered to debts and ancestral weight. Yet as Latif suggests, both men are children of history, products of decisions made generations before them. The film thrives on this symmetry: Charles’s house, imbued with memories and ancestral pain, becomes both prison and confessional. The walls breathe with past traumas, and the basement becomes a site of reckoning where guilt, privilege, and grief entangle.

Latif’s direction emphasizes the house as more than setting; it becomes a primal character. Like a ghost story, The Man in My Basement is haunted not only by Bennet’s sins but by the very structure of America – the erasures of African history, the lingering violence of white supremacy, the quiet despair of inherited debts. Sag Harbor itself is shot with an air of longing and decay, a neighborhood carrying both memory and mourning. Shadows pool in corners, light never fully warms, and the atmosphere lingers between elegy and dread.

At its core, the film interrogates privilege and history. Bennet’s own background complicates easy categories – a man of mixed descent, uncertain of his lineage, claiming ties that may or may not be true. His ability to pass, to claim Anglo whiteness, has afforded him privilege that Charles can never access. And yet even he is trapped by history, condemned to repeat patterns of violence and repentance. Latif refuses simple answers: is the film a critique of whiteness, of privilege, of the banality of evil itself? Or is it, more radically, a study of how history imprints itself on every person, every inheritance, every home?

Hawkins anchors the film with quiet resilience, his performance shaded with grief but never flattened into victimhood. Dafoe, meanwhile, delivers one of his most startling turns in years: a portrait of a man who weaponizes confession, using suffering as a final performance. Their scenes together simmer with tension, as if every exchange of dialogue risks collapse into violence or revelation.

Ultimately, The Man in My Basement plays less like a moral lesson than like a ghost story, one where the house itself contains the unresolved struggles of America. The past refuses to remain buried; the present is built on foundations cracked with memory. “We’re both the decisions of those who came before us,” Bennet remarks, and it is this acknowledgment of inheritance, whether of privilege or of pain, that gives the film its aching power. Latif ends not in despair but in a fragile gesture of faith. Faces of children linger in the final frames, eyes open to both past and future. The ghosts remain, but in their presence, there is also the possibility of connection, of overcoming, of something better yet to come. The Man in My Basement is an impressive, unsettling debut feature; a haunted elegy of inheritance and repentance, where the sins of history echo in every room, and where two men, locked together in confrontation, reveal the weight of a nation’s unhealed wounds.