The Man in the Basement (Le Guay, 2021)
Movies about strangers that insinuate themselves into domestic spaces are numerous and have been approached in many ways. The situation has been played for humor (The Man Who Came to Dinner, What About Bob?), straight-up horror (Straw Dogs, Funny Games), or suspense (Pacific Heights, Law Abiding Citizen).
The Man in the Basement is closest in spirit to the latter films on that list, but Fonzic (François Cluzet) , the unwanted tenant of Simon Sandberg (Jérémie Renier) is not a rogue cop nor a criminal sociopath. He’s a Holocaust denier. The review question then is whether this setup is enough of a twist on the situation to differentiate the film from others in its genre. My answer was, eventually, “no.”
The film hovers somewhere between passably interesting and ultimately dissatisfying by raising the question of whether Fonzic’s historical revisionism is only distasteful or actually dangerous. But that question isn’t seriously examined much less answered. It is present only to raise the tension until we can come to the inevitable conclusion of most such genre pieces: personal violence. When that violence comes, the answer that we already know is made manifest — Fonzic’s act is mostly just that — a way of gaming the system and the people he abhors.
What ultimately limits the film is not the antisemitic theme but its awkward construction. The people in Simon’s immediate surroundings are plot levers to raise the tension, not fully-realized characters that allow the plot to have any push and pull. Simon’s daughter, who Fonzic approaches and tries to indoctrinate, is alternately worldly-wise and then conveniently naive. The neighbors are horrified by Fonzic’s antisemitism when the plot needs them to blame Simon for renting to him and then defensive of him when Simon tries to evict him. Simon’s wife and family continually pressure Simon to do . . . something, yet always while berating him for doing something (renting the basement) in the first place.
I suspect the lack of empathy for Simon is meant to imply he is a double victim — that society doesn’t take antisemitism as seriously as other forms of racism or aggression. Perhaps there is a point being made as well about people’s willingness to complain in a social media era but how little they actually support those who try to address what they are complaining about. If so, that idea is also underdeveloped; it’s used only to justify Simon’s turn to violence rather than explain it.
The Man in the Basement is a bit of a mousetrap movie — Simon’s every attempt to resolve the situation by some means other than violence is thwarted, so what’s a good, conscientious Frenchman to do? I am not totally averse to mousetrap movies. (A Man for All Seasons, one of my all-time favorites, is essentially a mousetrap movie.) But to work, the mousetrap — that is, the plot — has to be very well designed. Here, in the lead-up to the trap, one feels irritation at the artificiality of the construction rather than dread. When the trap is metaphorically sprung, we don’t feel as though the outcome was inevitable so much as predetermined by a screenwriter.
