News The Man in My Basement Willem Dafoe Is a Terrible Tenant in The Man in My Basement Trailer Hulu’s Walter Mosley adaptation arrives later this year. By Molly Templeton | Published on June 6, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share One has to admit that it’s a dubious, if financially lucrative, proposal: Let a total stranger rent your basement for 65 days at a cost of $1,000 per day. Oh, P.S., you can’t tell anyone about him. Dicey. Very dicey. And even this very brief teaser makes clear that there is something very wrong with the man (Willem Dafoe) who wants to rent the basement belonging to Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins). The Man in My Basement is based on the 2005 novel by Walter Mosley, and its synopsis gives a few more clues as to what’s going on here: The man at Charles Blakey’s door has a proposition almost too strange for words. The stranger offers him $50,000 in cash to spend the summer in Charles’s basement, and Charles cannot even begin to guess why. The beautiful house has been in the Blakey family for generations, but Charles has just lost his job and is behind on his mortgage payments. The money would be welcome. But Charles Blakey is black and Anniston Bennet is white, and it is clear that the stranger wants more than a basement view. There is something deeper and darker about his request, and Charles does not need any more trouble. But financial necessity leaves him no choice. Once Anniston Bennet is installed in his basement, Charles is cast into a role he never dreamed of. Anniston has some very particular requests for his landlord, and try as he might, Charles cannot avoid being lured into Bennet’s strange world. At first he resists, but soon he is tempted — tempted to understand a set of codes that has always eluded him, tempted by the opportunity to understand the secret ways of white folks.Charles’s summer with a man in his basement turns into an exploration of inconceivable worlds of power and manipulation, and unimagined realms of humanity. Walter Mosley pierces long-hidden veins of justice and morality with startling insight into the deepest mysteries of human nature. The movie is the feature film debut of theater director Nadia Latif; she and Mosley wrote the screenplay together. Latif told Entertainment Weekly, “I haven’t stopped thinking about the novel since I first read it 20 years ago.” Actor Hawkins told the magazine, “A script centered on blackness in middle-class Sag Harbor in the ’90s is loaded with cultural significance. I love that Nadia honored all of that and was willing to deconstruct the script with us, interrogate it, and put it back together — all of the ugly, all of the beauty. She took the essence of Mosley’s novel and distilled it into something very unique.” The Man in My Basement arrives in theaters and on Hulu this fall.[end-mark] The post Willem Dafoe Is a Terrible Tenant in <i>The Man in My Basement</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.