I have no inherent issue with a movie that opts to be a slow burn. It can spend as much time as it wants establishing character personalities, relationships, setting, and story… so long as the contract is respected. This is to say that I will be as patient as I possibly can, but I expect to be rewarded for my patience with something unique, interesting, or, at the very, very least, entertaining. I will never give up on a film halfway through, but I have expectations for my invested time and interest.
The Woman In The Yard
Release Date: March 28, 2025
Directed By: Jaume Collet-Serra
Written By: Sam Stefanak
Starring: Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Peyton Jackson, Estella Kahiha, and Russell Hornsby
Rating: PG-13 for terror, some violent content/bloody images, suicide-related content, and brief strong language
Runtime: 87 minutes
Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Woman In The Yard is a feature that breaks that contract. It sports a high concept idea that is compelled by a singular haunting image, and it keeps you on the hook curious about what it all means – but for a film that is only 87 minutes with credits, it takes forever to get where it wants to go, and when it does actually arrive at the meat of what it wants to do, it spirals into nonsense that is neither meaningful or scary (both being pretty important in horror storytelling).
The talented Danielle Deadwyler stars as Ramona, a recent widow whose life is still very much consumed by missing her dead husband (Russell Hornsby), and the consequence of this constant sorrow is detriment to her home life living on a remote farm. She has a son, Taylor (Peyton Jackson), and daughter, Annie (Estella Kahiha), to care for, but things like paying the power bill and going food shopping get deprioritized as she heals a broken leg and gets lost in watching old videos on her phone.
Life is depressing and tense in the household, and things get worse when Taylor looks outside and notices that a woman wearing a black dress and a black veil (Okwui Okpokwasili) has mysteriously appeared on their property and sits still on a chair looking at the house. When approached, she doesn’t introduce herself and is cryptic about her intentions, but her energy is registered as sinister. Ramona and the kids bunker inside, keeping an eye on her through the window, and over the course of the day, they register her getting closer and closer.
There is a shocking amount of time in The Woman In The Yard dedicated to watching the main characters do nothing.
As the director of 2009’s Orphan, Jaume Collet-Serra successfully pulled off one of 21st century horror’s weirdest twists, and having that knowledge at the back of my mind helped me give The Woman In The Yard a long leash to develop into something interesting, but there really is just no excusing how lifeless the film is through its first two acts. There is an obvious effort to create tension with a mix of the titular mysterious figure, Ramona’s melancholy, Taylor’s frustration at the situation, and Annie’s innocence, but the action taken by the family to try and remedy the spooky situation is to do absolutely nothing, and it’s a snore.
Trying to give the film the benefit of the doubt, my mind spent this extreme down time thinking about where it was all leading, what the woman in the yard represented, and how the characters could actually start confronting the creepiness… but that just led me to resent the movie for trying to get me to entertain myself instead of being properly engaging. It banks on audiences being terrified for 60-plus minutes by an ominous presence alone, and it’s a failure.
When things do finally start happening in The Woman In The Yard, it’s chaotic nonsense.
Unfortunately, once The Woman In The Yard does finally try to do something, the film doesn’t get better; it simply gets more chaotic. After spending most of the movie doing little more than being spooky and letting her black veil softly ripple in the breeze of the day, the eponymous antagonist’s abilities suddenly become specific and shadow-based; there is a revelation made that is heavily overplayed; and then the movie goes full off-the-wall with the introduction of a mirror universe where things are the same but slightly different.
The movie tries to make up for the lack of anything interesting in the first two-thirds of the story by going full kitchen sink in the climax, and it’s neither scary nor effective at communicating any deeper levels. It does ultimately make clear what the woman in the yard is meant to represent, and I can appreciate the darkness that it aims for with its big ideas, but the build-up to it doesn’t work properly and there is no satisfaction delivered from the conclusion. The cherry on top is an ambiguous ending that is wholly unearned; it tries to make you rethink everything that goes down in the third act and where things lead, but it’s both unclear and it doesn’t track logically. Confusing and toothless is a bad mix.
I give a lot of credit to Jaume Collet-Serra as a filmmaker who likes to mix things up and doesn’t like to tell the same kind of story twice – with this movie being his follow-up to Carry-On, his fun, Die Hard–esque thriller released by Netflix at the end of last year. However, that range is only meaningful when it’s being executed with quality storytelling, and in that respect, The Woman In The Yard is a significant disappointment. I exhibited patience with it, but my hopes for a quality payoff were dashed. If you’re a likeminded, ever-optimistic horror fan, don’t make the same mistake that I did.