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Feature 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 in Sag Harbor in New York state, a neighbourhood with strong African American community: Corey Hawkins plays a troubled black man called Charles Blakey who lives alone in a handsome but neglected house which has been in his family for eight generations. Charles nursed his late mother and uncle there, but rashly took out a loan against the property; and now, unable to get a job due to a question mark over his honesty and unable to make the mortgage repayments, he may lose this roof over his head. A local antiques expert Narciss Gully (Anna Diop) tells him his late mother’s possessions might be worth a good deal, especially her collection of west African masks, but the cash could take some time. Charles needs money now.
And it is at this moment that a mysterious, charmingly persuasive yet sinister white businessman called Anniston Bennet, potently played by Willem Dafoe, shows up at his door, offering him $50,000 in cash in return for renting his basement for a couple of months. Charles feels he has no choice but to agree, and to allow Mr Bennet, and his strange luggage into his home; an arrangement which is to lead to a nightmarish psychodrama.
The story feels like a supernatural horror or a ghost story, and yet doesn’t conform to either. There are plenty of moments when Charles has nightmares, but the ordinary reality into which he awakes now feels like a queasy bad dream. Bennet seems to want to confront Charles in some way, to taunt him, to mock him, to exult over him – and all from a strange position of ostensible weakness, as Charles’s tenant-slash-prisoner on whose money Charles is now dependent. The position of white and black is reversed. Or is it? Mr Rochester had his madwoman in the attic; Charles has his white paying guest in the basement. It’s an eerie, disquieting experience.
