THE WOMAN IN THE YARD - Mark Reviews Movies

The Woman in the Yard, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2025

The woman in the yard in The Woman in the Yard is a metaphor, in case the figure's mourning dress and veil aren't enough of a hint. The woman, dressed all in black and with her entire body—save for her sometimes bloody hands—covered, appears early into the movie, after it's revealed that the yard where the mysterious woman sits politely in an old chair belongs to a family in grief.

There is something unsettling about this image, which is a good thing for director Jaume Collet-Serra's horror tale, considering that a significant portion of the second act amounts to the camera observing the woman at multiple angles and from various distances. The figure, played by Okwui Okpokwasili, doesn't do much more than sit, look in the general direction of the farmhouse where the family is, and offer indistinct warnings and insinuations that something very, very bad is about to happen.

Sometimes, a good gimmick is enough to serve as the foundation of a story, and watching Sam Stefanak's screenplay unfold, one wishes this story matched the promise of its gimmick to even a minor degree. Instead, we find ourselves yet again in that continuing trend of horror movies in which the antagonist is both a blunt metaphor and an even blunter type of monster. Once the movie finally reveals the full extent of what the woman in the yard represents beyond some vague concept of grief, one really wonders why anyone would try to transform this entity into a jump-scare-happy ghost or otherworldly being. Isn't the mystery woman's true nature more horrifying than any of the movie's obviously staged shocks?

The truth won't be revealed here, of course, although it is worth nothing that what the ghostly woman becomes to our main character takes this story, if only briefly, in a direction that is truly upsetting and more terrifying than anything before it in the repetitive tale. Considering how long it takes for Stefanak's script to get there and how many times it does the same things over and over again, the material might have been better suited to a short film than a feature.

The basics of the minimal plot see Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) still reeling after the death of her husband (played by Russell Hornsby), who bought this literal farm—before buying the metaphorical one, which might be a bit of inside joke here, too—to have a nice, quiet life for and with his family. Instead, he was killed in a car crash that has left Ramona in a leg brace and on crutches, so melancholy that she has to be forced out of bed, and to raise her two children, teenaged Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and young Annie (Estella Kahiha), on her own.

After some tensions flare among the family, the woman in black appears out of nowhere in the large expanse of the property's backyard. Ramona goes out to ask the woman who she is, where she came from, and to leave, but the woman doesn't seem to know who she is, where she came from, or why she should leave. She only offers Ramona the cryptic statement, "Today's the day."

From there, the movie gives us a lot of staring at, talk about, and little action from the woman, who just sits in the chair while Ramona and her son argue about what can be done about the enigmatic stranger. Occasionally, someone notices that the woman is getting closer to the house.

Eventually, it's revealed that the woman can manipulate objects and even cause harm by way of her shadow interacting with the shadows of other things. When an inevitable game of hide-and-seek and showdown with the ghostly entity erupts, the family seems to understand exactly how the mechanics of her sinister shadow puppetry work, even though none of them has directly witnessed her doing that little trick. Compared to the deadening pace throughout and the later haphazard combination of the supernatural and the psychological, this is a minor inconsistency in the storytelling, though.

The whole business with the yard-based woman, of course, is a way for us to see Ramona dealing with the grief, guilt, and anger of losing her husband, having difficulty with the kids, and being stuck on this farm. That's an idea for a grounded story, as well as one that might have matched the authenticity of Deadwyler's performance. Instead, The Woman in the Yard plays so many games with what's real and what's otherworldly/delusional that it's not grounded in anything apart from trying to confound us, getting at one piece of terrible truth, and otherwise numbing us with its predictable tricks and roundabout storytelling.

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