The Man in My Basement (2025)
Premise: Charles Blakey is not doing great, let’s be honest. He’s seriously in debt, he’s clearly got a drinking problem and keeps antagonizing his friends. The bank seems to be about to kick him out of his house unless he can pay, but of course he’s missing the key ingredient in that recipe. That is, until Willem Dafoe appears and offers him a huge amount of money to rent his basement for a couple of months. It all seems peachy, except Mr Dafoe immediately uh locks himself up in kind of a makeshift jail in Charles’ basement and it gets a bit weird but not kinky weird, just off.
Under 90 minutes? Nope! About fifteen minutes more than that.
Do they say the title? No, it’s a big secret that Mr Dafoe is there so of course he doesn’t bring up the man in his basement, ever. I’d say it would make for a great icebreaker, though.
First thing I thought of:
Okay, more: This was kind of disappointing, to be honest. I thought I was going to get, basically, The Lighthouse (now in The Basement) and… nope. There are some really cool moments where our two main charactesr are having some arguments or tense conversations - but that’s about that, just a few moments in a movie that is way over the perfect length. Apparently this is based on a book and something tells me adapting it was one of those “more that you can chew” situations because there are hints of a lot more going on than what we are shown or told here. Dunno, I guess I wanted more of our resident gremlin.
A simple way to improve it: the movie marketing also lied to me because I was told this was horror, and, uhm, I mean, there are a couple of moments that are pretty fugly and at first it looks like it’s going to be a haunted house movie, but… you know, you could add a couple of ghosts here and there and it’d be cool. Maybe one of them could fart on command?
Trivia about the IMDb trivia letterboxd reviews:
not really a willem dafoe picture without his third leg swinging around 😭
It’s like the Nintendo Seal of Quality but for movies, huh?
