The Woman in the Yard (2025)
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra
Premise: A recently widowed mother (Danielle Deadwyler) mourns the death of her husband. A mysterious woman in a black shroud (Okwui Okpokwasili) appears on the lawn of her rural home.
What Works: The Woman in the Yard is a supernatural horror picture of a family terrorized by a malevolent spirit. The conceit visualizes depression and grief. The film is mostly effective and the metaphor adds meaning and dramatic weight to the supernatural premise. The strongest aspect of The Woman in the Yard is the family. Danielle Deadwyler plays the mother who is hobbled following the car wreck that killed her husband. The mother is plagued by guilt and grief but puts on a brave face for the sake of her children and Deadwyler conveys that inner strain throughout her performance. The mother is failing to provide for her children, leading to tension with her teenage son, played by Peyton Jackson, who steps in as caregiver to his younger sister, played by Estella Kahiha. There is an observable tension between mother and son but they both work to shield the daughter from it. Deadwyler, Jackson, and Kahiha are convincing as a family and their interactions reveal a lot about their relationships without explaining it. The Woman in the Yard comes from filmmaker Jaume Collet-Serra who has also directed The Shallows, Orphan, and several Liam Neeson action pictures. This is slightly different material for Collet-Serra. It’s more complex and psychological than his other work but it also demonstrates his knack for tension. The Woman in the Yard is impressively shot by Pawel Pogorzelski with some creative use of camera angles, shadow, and light.
What Doesn’t: The Woman in the Yard loses its way in the ending. The storytelling and filmmaking are quite deliberate up until the final stretch. The filmmakers set up a tense scenario and the family’s circumstances gradually become more desperate. The story sets up a situation in which this broken family must come together to face a shared threat and the mother must reassert her parental role. Instead, the film goes off in a different direction that isn’t satisfying. The action of the last few minutes is confusing and the metaphor is fumbled. The clumsy moviemaking obfuscates the point of the story. The Woman in the Yard entertains ideas about depression, grief, and motherhood but doesn’t really say anything. The conceit of the story is also very familiar and has been done better and more interestingly in Lights Out and The Night House.
Bottom Line: The Woman in the Yard is an effective supernatural story. It’s well produced and has a very good cast. The story is a bit too familiar and the metaphor loses its way in the end, which makes for a disappointing conclusion to what is otherwise a good haunting tale.
Episode: #1042 (April 6, 2025)