The Woman in the Yard: this ghostly study of grief isn't worth leaving the house for

Telegraph

27-03-2025

The Woman in the Yard takes a favourite horror theme – grief – and literalises it on the doorstep of the main character.
Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) has survived a car crash that claimed the life of her husband (Russell Hornsby), leaving her to look after two children in an American Gothic farmhouse. She's still recovering from severe injuries that have left her on crutches, and is not far off catatonic in her emotional state.
In their front garden, a veiled woman in black appears one morning, seated in a chair on the lawn. 'Today's the day,' this wraith, played by Okwui Okpokwasili, announces to Ramona. She doesn't explain what she's on about, but inches closer to the house every time someone looks, in the manner of Grandmother's Footsteps.
The shadows she casts take on a life of their own – they can throttle and rampage. The family realises that their best hope to defeat her is darkness, not light: once they've barricaded themselves inside, the film simply becomes a wait for the sun to go down. Leaving a torch on in the attic turns out to be a grave mistake.
Deadwyler is a great actress for whom horror ought to be a stomping ground: Toni Collette in Hereditary, Florence Pugh in Midsommar and Essie Davis in The Babadook all proved how much the genre can benefit from an all-stops-out lead performance. She's capable of much the same.
But those films developed jaggedly, along uncanny lines, without just dumping their symbolism in our laps. The title spectre here suggests Susan Hill's Woman in Black, if she pitched up at a Day of the Dead costume party, was zero fun, and held everyone hostage to a performance piece about fraying mental health and morbid thoughts of the beyond. The Devil Wears Prada's Miranda Priestly might have reviewed her black vestments with a single mutter – 'groundbreaking'.
The film leans heavily on the nervy gravitas of its leading lady, and just as much on the flashy editing and VFX showmanship of the prolific director, Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, Jungle Cruise, Carry-On). He can lay on industry-standard jump scares, get the sound designers to goose us, and weave in some cool shadow-play that certainly manages to get noticed in the absence of any real plot. But there's little here to keep us up at night – or from forgetting all about it by tomorrow.
15 cert, 88 min; in cinemas March 28