Director – Jaume Collet-Serra, Screenplay – Sam Stefanak, Producers – Stephanie Allain & Jason Blum, Photography – Pawel Pogorzelski, Music – Lorne Balfe, Visual Effects Supervisor – Matthew J. Bramante, Visual Effects – The Banditry (Supervisor – Justin Younger), Exceptional Minds & FuseFX (Supervisor – Carlos Puigdollers Zanon), Special Effects Supervisor – Troy Cloud, Makeup Effects – Fractured FX, Inc. (Designer – Justin Raleigh), Production Design – Marc Fisichella. Production Company – Blumhouse/Homegrown Pictures.
Cast
Danielle Deadwyler (Ramona), Peyton Jackson (Taylor), Okwui Okpokwasili (Woman), Estella Kahiha (Annie), Russell Hornsby (David)
Plot
Ramona and her two children Taylor and Annie are at home on their farm. Ramona is recovering and still with her leg in plaster after an accident that killed her husband David. One morning, a woman all in black with her face hidden behind a veil. appears sitting on a chair in the yard. The woman does nothing, but her presence becomes increasingly sinister in its effect. When they are not looking, she seems to gradually move closer to the house. This serves to drive them to desperation and bring out secrets.
The Woman in the Yard is a release from Blumhouse. It comes from Jaume Collet-Serra, a Spanish director who first appeared with the Dark Castle horror films House of Wax (2005) and Orphan (2009) and the thriller Unknown (2011). He went on to the action films Non-Stop (2014), Run All Night (2015), The Commuter (2018) and Carry-On (2024), the killer shark film The Shallows (2016) and most recently his associations with Dwayne Johnson with the Disney theme park adaptation Jungle Cruise (2021) and the DC superhero film Black Adam (2022). Collet-Serra has also produced Hooked Up (2013), Mindscape (2013), Eden (2014), Curve (2015), Extinction (2015) and the tv series Reverie (2018).
Jaume Collet-Serra has proven a capable commercial director. I don’t care much for his action movies but he has done solid work in the times he has ventured into the horror genre – The Shallows in particular was a gripping seat-edge variant on the killer shark film. I even quite liked his handling of the generally dismissed Black Adam. So it is with quiet expectations that one watches his taking on what is a ghost story but not quite.
The Woman in the Yard has an interestingly original set up. It is about a family in a house and a mystery woman who appears seated in the yard, wearing a veil. She rarely moves – at least when people are looking, although seems to come closer to the house when they are not. One keeps thinking of the Weeping Angels in tv’s Doctor Who (2005- ), although in this case the woman does speak (briefly) and towards the end enters the house and begins moving about and disturbing things.
Okwui Okpokwasili as The Woman in the Yard
Jaume Collet-Serra does a fine job in constructing a contained film that uses a single location – the film never moves beyond the house and its yard apart from some very brief flashback scenes to the accident – and a cast of four (plus the dead husband in flashbacks). Within that, Collet-Serra creates a fine sense of suspense and eerie horror. The effect that the woman has even though just sitting in the yard and never moving creates considerable dread. Or the games of reality and illusion like when Danielle Deadwyler imagines she is stabbing her daughter. When the woman’s shadow starts creeping up the side of the house to tinkle wind chimes, things get quite eerie.
I thought The Woman in the Yard was developing quite a degree of promise at this point. However, the effectiveness of the first half then starts to go sideways in about the latter third of the show when the woman enters the house and Danielle Deadwyler and family are hunkered down in the attic. Here Collet-Serra lets the initial promise fall through his hands in a series of standard jumps. The scenes with the woman moving through the house throwing things around are just so incredibly run of the mill that all the film’s build up dissipates. When Danielle Deadwyler finds out the nature of what the woman is, the denouement comes down to a giant overwrought allegory that causes the film loses the wind out of its sails.
