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.