Some genre movies grow and transform. Others, like Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Woman in the Yard, metastasize. What begins as streamlined (if slightly unbalanced) modern folk horror soon bloats into a half a dozen different films, heat-welded jankily together as they build to a confoundingly distasteful finale.
Oddly enough, it might have been easier to swallow had it also been visually drab. That The Woman in the Yard looks as good as it does — in service of a uniquely-executed conceit appearing midway through — makes it all the more of a waste. What Collet-Serra does with light and shadow is often marvellous, and could have resulted in a contemporary horror classic had much else around these aesthetic flourishes worked as intended.
Instead, what we’re left with is a deftly-performed family drama sandwiched between as many different spooky concepts as found within The Cabin in the Woods. The major difference is that Sam Stefanak’s script is entirely straightforward, rather than satirical, making for some head-spinning disconnects.
What is The Woman in the Yard about?
At its core, The Woman in the Yard is about grief — wait, where are you going? Hear me out.
The film doesn’t necessarily disguise this theme or make it abstract in the vein of modern "prestige" horror, but rather, presents it nakedly in its opening scenes. Recent widow Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) wakes up in a daze in her rural Georgia home, her leg still broken from the road accident that recently killed her husband. She’s having trouble paying the bills, so the power to her isolated farmland fixer-upper has been cut. Her adolescent son Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and elementary school-aged daughter Annie (Estella Kahiha) help out where they can, even if that means cooking up a culinary nightmare involving Doritos and eggs.
The trio tries to keep their heads above water, even in the noticeable absence of patriarch David (Russell Hornsby), a charming and ambitious man we meet in flashbacks and in the videos Ramona mournfully rewatches. Collet-Serra’s directing is at its most even-handed in these calm, domestic moments, during which an empty dining table chair comes to represent the family's loss, which clearly weighs on the struggling mother (though less so on her children).
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Ramona’s attention frequently wavers, and before she knows it, a woman in a black veil (Okwui Okpokwasili) is seated in an ornate chair at the edge of her front yard. More than any theme or emotion, this mysterious figure represents a conundrum, and a much more novel horror premise than the trio dealing with a recent death. With their phones dead and no one around for miles, do they confront her or simply leave her be?
Eventually, Ramona steps outside to make contact, which is when things start to get eerie — in some ways that suit this setup, and other ways that very much do not.
No, really, what is The Woman in the Yard actually about?
Good horror movies are rarely set during the day, and in The Woman in the Yard, things don’t start popping off until the late afternoon when the mysterious figure begins casting lengthy shadows that gradually approach the house. Collet-Serra and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski (known for his work with Ari Aster) turn the space around Ramona's home into a visual sandbox, where light and darkness interact in unexpected ways. Sometimes a shadow is a looming threat. Other times, it has weight and interacts with the physical world. That's creepy, and it's also cool as hell.
However, the subtle horrors of the woman's somber presence, as she inches towards the family, become very quickly subsumed by additional ideas and gimmicks that pile up far too quickly. The woman needn't represent anything to be imposing, and had she embodied perhaps one or two themes or concepts troubling Ramona, the result would've at least been functional. Instead, she veers between ominous presence, omniscient soothsayer, child kidnapper, animal murderer, retroactive flashback demon, and more, depending on what a given moment demands.
At first, she forces wedges between the remaining family members, pushing them to confront lies and half-truths surrounding David's death, but it isn't long before the movie starts dipping its toe into flimsily-established metaphysical horrors, which have little bearing on the existing premise. Before you know it, The Woman in the Yard has flirted with possession, mirror worlds, temporal displacement, and an unfortunate mental health metaphor that unfolds in some pretty ghastly ways.
The Woman in the Yard zig-zags right off the rails
Usually, a standout performance or two might save a dwindling movie. Deadwyler performs admirably as a mother trying to keep her family together through a tragic situation. Okpokwasili makes for an imposing presence, and newcomer Jackson is a pleasant surprise as a boy trying to figure out his place as the man of the house (even though much of his dialogue is spent trying to Cinema Sins-proof the movie and explain why the family can't just leave or make a phone call). However, no amount of emoting is enough to stay such a choppy, unpredictable course.
The Woman in the Yard causes significant narrative whiplash with each question it answers, though none of its conclusions are satisfying. As soon as it establishes the mechanics of its ghostly villain — for instance, the way she uses and moves through shadows — there's some other power lurking around the corner, resulting in a random string of chase scenes where tension can't possibly be established, because neither the family nor the audience have any idea what they're up against.
What the woman represents is vague enough that her symbolism doesn't matter, at least at first. Her funeral attire makes her a specter or reminder of death in the abstract. That's really all you need. However, by the time the movie pulls back its final curtain — after several… well, calling them "twists" would be generous — the woman actually does come to embody something rather morose, but not in a way the movie establishes beforehand.
With concept upon concept thrown at the wall to see what sticks, the movie crescendoes in some bafflingly wrong-headed moments that Collet-Serra hasn't carved out the time to approach with the requisite care. On one hand, horror ought to be a visceral embodiment of one's biggest fears, but on the other, The Woman in the Yard verges on genuinely irresponsible with its casual framing of something realistically tragic and painful.
Then again, reading this finale also requires intuiting dozens of minor clues which feel like they're from entirely different movies. The Woman in the Yard presents these far too quickly and carelessly, to the point that most audiences are likely to come away thinking they’ve watched an open, unresolved ending, even though this likely isn't the case.
How a movie likes this comes to exist, in such preposterous form, is a mystery unto itself — one far more interesting than what ends up on screen.
