‘The Woman in the Yard' Will Get Inside Your Head

Yahoo

30-03-2025

Imagine a stranger just suddenly showed up in your front yard. No invitation, no announcement, no sense of who they are or where they came from. They're simply sitting there, on a chair (that they apparently brought?), covered in what looks like a long, black veil from head to toe. They don't seem anxious to approach the house, nor do they seem to be in a hurry to leave the property, located in the outskirts of rural Georgia. This mystery person is simply there. Watching. Waiting for …something.
If you're Taylor (Peyton Jackson), a teenager who's had to become an adult way too quickly, you go into action mode: How do we get this intruder off our lawn? If you're Annie (Estella Kahiha), his younger sister, you express your fear: Why does it feel like we've inadvertently stepped into a scary Twilight Zone episode? And if you're Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler, great as always), their recently widowed mom who's still recuperating from a car accident that took the life of their dad, David (The Hate U Give's Russell Hornsby), you venture out to greet her: Who are you, and what do you want? The woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) doesn't answer her. Not really. But she does tell Ramona that she's been praying for her to show up, so she answered the call. And, according to this sinister figure, Ramona needs to know that 'today is the day… Today. Is. The. Day.'
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Like a particularly concise, purposefully elliptical short story, The Woman in the Yard quickly milks this beguiling, WTF-is-going-on-here? scenario for all the dread it's worth, while not necessarily being in a hurry to fill folks in on the full 411 regarding this sticky situation. We do know that it was David's idea to buy this farm in the middle of nowhere, complete with a chicken coop, in an effort to make his artist wife feel less boxed in by city living. The guilt and grief Ramona feels over his death has left her numb. The power is out, her cell phone is dead, and the family is extremely running low on food and supplies. There's tension in this household, in addition to a glaring feeling of absence, even before the lady with the endlessly cryptic statements and blood-stained palms shows up. It's only a matter of time before the confrontations between this visitor and this trio become more aggressive, and the standoff between the two parties begins to move from the yard to the front steps, and beyond.
You might harbor a guess or two about where this psychological thriller is headed before it gets there, and TV scribe-turned-screenwriter Sam Stefanak's script feels like he's studied a lot of Stephen King's novellas and Rod Serling's anthology shows in equal measure. There's a lot more suggestive, unnerving spookiness here along the lines of producer Val Lewton's Gothic spine-tinglers for RKO than the kind of jump-scare efficiency machines you associate with modern horror; it's hard to think of a movie that's used creeping shadows more effectively in recent years. And even if prolific-to-the-point-of-workaholic director Jaume Collet-Serra occasionally makes things stylistically busier than they occasionally need to be — and overlays his hand in the third act — he's a hell of lot better as a contemporary B-movie genre filmmaker than Liam Neeson's go-to action guy or a for-hire studio journeyman. If projects like this surprisingly solid take on the return of the repressed keeps him from doing stuff like Black Adam and Jungle Cruise (or help him bankroll a sequel to his absolute banger of a 2016 survivalist flick The Shallows, because a boy can dream), we'll happily sit in theaters to support him, black veil and all.
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