The Woman In The Yard

Playing Your
Yards Right

The Woman In The Yard
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
USA 2025
Blumhouse
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Apologies but there are some pretty big hints at spoilers in here... if you haven’t already guessed the identity of the title character from the trailer, that is.

The Woman In The Yard is Jaume Collet-Serra’s new horror movie... or possibly a dark sci-fi fantasy depending on your mindset but, I think this one pretty much crosses over into the realm of the horror film, for me at least.

The film stars Danielle Deadwyler, who was so fantastic in the TV adaptation of Station Eleven (reviewed here) as a mother who has survived the car crash which killed her husband but has gone into a sharp mental decline as a result, trying to look after her son and daughter (played brilliantly by Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahiha) with the bills piling up, the money and food on her farm drying up and, on the day in which the film plays out, the electricity being cut off. And then a veiled woman appears sitting in the yard, watching them and giving enigmatic and cryptic foreshadowing as to her malevolent presence here. Then she starts attacking the house in shadowy and sinister ways from her chair, which occasionally gets magically closer to the building.

And it’s a great set up for a while. I loved the first hour of this movie and I thought some of the cinematography was great, such as that great shot which is also seen in the trailer where the camera pans down from a distorted glass window shot looking out to the woman in the yard and then hitting clear glass panel but keeping the blur of the vertical line of the foreground window plummeting down the shot. And, with the various ways in which the reality of the world of the house is distorted and keyed into the shadows, I have to say the film made me think of the long, shadowy arm that the legacy of early 20th Century German Expression such as The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu has cast on cinema over the years. This film does seem to have the spirit of that atmosphere within a lot of its DNA, it seemed to me.

Alas, the last half an hour of the picture was, for me, a real dud. A lot of the mystery of the film seems to hinge on the identity of the mysterious woman and, honestly, I correctly identified who it was just from the trailer. At one point the director tries to pull the wool over the eyes of the audience by introducing another actress in the mix, Okwui Okpokwasili but, this just makes the follow through on the ending of this one even more disappointing and, although there is a certain amount of interpretation to be had of that ending (which many people will take to be a happier ending than I think they will realise when they reflect on it a little bit later, after they’ve processed it), it’s just not enough for the last act to save the movie, which had been doing pretty well up until that point.

Ultimately, The Woman In The Yard is not a terrible movie and, honestly, I was really enjoying myself for the first hour but, it really does paint itself into a corner by the end of the story and having only 5 characters in the cast, including one actress who is a total red herring, doesn’t help it so much in terms of the mystery at the centre of the tale and I think a lot of people will be judging the film solely on its end game, to be honest. So I suspect it won’t have very favourable reviews, would be my guess. Still, a good try but, at the end of the day, it doesn’t quite make it into 1950s/1960s The Twilight Zone territory, I’m afraid... which is what I suspect it’s desperately going for. Sorry for the short review but, not much else to say about this one.

No One Will Save You

My Grey Heaven

No One Will Save You
Directed by Brian Duffield
USA 2023
Star Thrower Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers throughout.

Just a quick shout out to a movie from a couple of years ago called No One Will Save You and, also a bit of a warning because, in order to discuss this one properly, I think it’s necessary to talk about what happens at the end (most of the rest of the spoilers in here are just stuff you will figure out from the trailer). Also, I found out one of my comparisons I’m going to make, after I watched this and read the trivia section on the IMDB... well it turns out that Stephen King tweeted out the exact same connection to a specific episode of a specific TV show that had been in my mind when I was looking at this one. So glad I’m on the same page as everyone else here.

This is a movie about a young woman called Brynn (played by Kaitlyn Dever) who lives alone in her late parents large house, slightly remotely on the edge of a forest, a short bike or car ride from her local town (which she visits as little as possible). She is despised by a good deal of the population of the town for something which has happened in her past some ten or more years earlier. Something which Brynn has to live with every day.

And then, one night, as she is trying to sleep, she hears something downstairs. It’s a home invasion but, as she sneaks around trying to see who it is... she soon realises the question is not who but what’ is it? Which, as you’ll know if you’ve seen the trailer, is an alien. And not just any alien, this is obviously based on the greys (or Zeta Reticulans) of popular, modern UFO folklore (and don’t get me started... I gave up researching these guys years ago because of too many sleepless nights). That first night becomes a fight for survival but, survive Brynn does, after accidentally managing to kill said alien.

However, when she goes into town the next day, she finds signs that she’s not the only one who has been visited in the night. Indeed, not only does she change her mind about reporting it because of the reception she gets at the police station, but she’s chased by two humans who are obviously alien/human hybrids. And the rest of the film is about the second night, when more aliens come for her (and the rest of the local population).

Now I’ll get to that spoilery ending in a minute but, the film made me think of two specific sci-fi/horror tales of yesteryear. One of them is Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, based on the way aliens take control of humans with a living seed creature vomited from their mouths (in this case) into their victims. But the other thing was (and this is the thing Stephen King clocked too), the similarity to one of my top five episodes of The Twilight Zone, specifically The Invaders, which has a wonderful score by Jerry Goldsmith. That episode has a cast of one (Agnes Moorehead) and depicts a woman who is victim to a similar home invasion from teeny, tiny creatures. I won’t give the twist of that episode away (which is a humdinger) but, in order to make that twist work, there is no dialogue in the episode at all and it’s all set in the woman’s home.

Well, No One Wil Save You is definitely cut from the same cloth. The whole thing is practically wordless (other than a source song and some alien vocal sounds, there are only five words spoken throughout the whole film) and, asides from a few forest and town scenes, the majority takes place on Brynn’s property.

And it’s a well made suspenseful film, it has to be said. You will feel for the lead as she battles, with far inferior means, to stay out of the clutches of the aliens and, despite the revelations of what she did in the past, she’ll probably have your total sympathy (and that’s kind of the point in terms of leading to the ending of the movie too). And the greys themselves can be pretty terrifying, not just a one trick pony as they come in a variety of versions of increasing scariness. So there’s a definite feeling of unease as you watch Brynn fight for her life.

And so we come to the end... don’t read further unless you want to know.

By the end of the movie I felt kinda shortchanged by the conclusion... for all of thirty seconds... until I realised that this was a pretty good ending. When the aliens probe Brynn’s mind and discover how she’s repented for her accidental crime and had to live with the unforgiving towns folk, they spare her from being a human hybrid. Instead, with the planet now populated with human/alien hybrids, Brynn gets to live with them in her home town, teaching them how to be the best part of her human race, giving her a far easier and happier existence than when the Earth was populated by her own species. It’s kinda like what might have happened if the main protagonist of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers had let himself be reborn as an alien pod person, living in harmony (of a kind) with his fellow pod people... instead of what happened at the end of that movie. Here, Brynn has found her calling, continuing to live her life collecting doll houses for her diorama (where she watches her model townsfolk in a similar way to how the aliens hover in their flying saucers and monitor their new world) and teaching her new friends how to dance.

And that’s me done with that. No One Will Save You has a perfect ending for a pretty suspenseful film. Not the happy ending you might have wanted but, certainly a happy ending that Brynn deserved. And who needs humans anyway... horrible creatures. This one is definitely worth a watch, as far as I’m concerned.

Death Of A Unicorn

Unique Horn

Death Of A Unicorn
Directed by Alex Scharfman
USA/Hungary 2025
A24
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Definitely some minor spoilers here.

Death Of A Unicorn is a bit of an unusual film, it seems to me. At first I thought it was a little like one of those movies that Hollywood sometimes churns out as being an ‘independent movie’ when it’s about as far from one as you could get on a truly independent budget… but the studio is still trying to sell it as a quirky, fun and unusual movie to appeal to a specific kind of audience. And I’d normally avoid such things if it weren’t for the fact that, despite seeming to try to be all those things so fiercely… it is, actually, also a genuinely quirky, fun and unusual movie.

The story involves the oft times brilliant Paul Rudd as Elliot, a lawyer who has been invited around to a hugely wealthy family’s retreat in the mountains to seal a deal to serve said family, with the pharmaceutical CO father of the family (played by Richard E. Grant) near death from cancer. He is also accompanied by his daughter Ridley, played by the equally brilliant Jenna Ortega (who was so good in Beeteljuice Beeteljuice, reviewed here). They are here for the weekend but, on the way, they accidentally hit a unicorn with their car and, after trying to kill it to put it out of its misery, Elliot and Ridley get sprayed in its blood. This has the effect of clearing Ridley’s skin condition and fixing Elliot’s vision so he doesn’t need his glasses (among other things). They stuff the fabled creature into the back of the car and Elliot tries to get in good with the family, consisting of Grant, Tea Leoni, Will Poulter and various servants and doctors including Jessica Hynes as a personal bodyguard/chief of security. Then the unicorn wakes up and is put out of its misery again with a gun shot to the head… before the family discover the medicinal properties of its ground up horn, which cures the father of his cancer. The unicorn then becomes their main concern as a money spinner but, the unicorn’s mum and dad are on their way to take revenge on the humans… among other things.

And it is a nice little film. I was torn at first because the villainous, shallow, filthy rich family are given such over the top performances by their respective actors that it just felt like they were all having too much of a good time hamming it up at the expense of the audience, for a while. However, I can only think this must have been a deliberate instruction from the director because the characters who are not ‘all about the money’ and who are more decent types, all seem to come across as naturalistic and genuine in comparison. Rudd is delicately balancing a half in/ half out relationship with the human antagonists and Ortega, as the voice of reason, anchors the film when things threaten to get overly pretentious with the majority of the rest of the cast. Ortega also has a special relationship with the unicorns, it turns out… I’ll leave you to discover that element of the film for yourself.

It’s also a film where the depiction of right and wrong in terms of where the characters’ respective moral compasses are set is not necessarily something that will save them from the wrath of the unicorns. A doctor played by Sunita Mani, for instance, definitely has the audience sympathies I would say, despite being torn between her own humanity and the best financial interests of the family. This doesn’t stop her from being despatched in a way which would mean the police, who discover the bloodbath at the end of the movie, wouldn’t have to look in a few different places to recover her remains.

The film is nicely shot and edited with some amazing visual effects. The unicorns are, I can only assume, fully CGI but they come across as great personalities… and mostly terrifying. This is a 15 rated film in the UK and for good reason. Don’t bring your kids along to this one because the unicorns are quite ferocious and you will see some nicely gnarly scenes of such things as unicorn horn impaling and people being ripped apart (sometimes a thrilling combination of both) or, for example, having their heads burst under hoof. These unicorns have more in common with the ones depicted in the second Shazam! movie (reviewed here) than anything you might get in kiddie literature.

Also, it has a quite nice ending with a little ambiguity, perhaps, as to the fates of a couple of the characters but with a sense of positivity and, in one character, a certain sense of redemption for what’s gone before. So I have to admit I quite liked Death Of A Unicorn, which I was lucky enough to see four days before it opened officially, at a special preview screening. Very much worth a watch, I would say.