Parents' Guide to The Man in My Basement

While it sometimes veers off track and loses focus, this unusual thriller has an electrifying cat-and-mouse conversation at its center and grapples with powerful, relevant themes. Based on a 2004 novel by acclaimed author Walter Mosley—who co-adapted the screenplay with director Nadia Latif—The Man in My Basement is only the second Mosley book to make it to the big screen, after the detective story Devil in a Blue Dress, but this is an entirely different animal. This movie has surrealist touches, including hallucinations experienced by Charles, and certainly seeing Dafoe locked in a cage brings to mind his trapped-in-an-apartment movie Inside.

That's all well and good, but the movie really gets interesting when Charles and Anniston get down to talking, really talking. Their conversations, while wily and evasive, cover themes like good and evil, power vs. powerlessness, and White privilege and systemic racism. Charles' tense encounters with Narciss also help underline some of these topics, as they argue about what to do with the family artifacts. Truthfully, the movie doesn't quite seem to know what to do with Charles when he's not with the other characters, and there are perhaps a few too many moments of him seemingly going slowly off the rails. But, that aside, The Man in My Basement is still worth visiting—and pondering.