THE WOMAN IN THE YARD (2025)

In many cultural myths and folktales, there exists a story of a restless spirit who roams the world of the living, seeking to rectify grievances they endured while alive and will continue to do so until they’ve punished those who have done wrong to them. Some cultures depict the spirit as one fueled by vengeance, while others wish to ease their melancholia from a lack of a proper burial. The spirit’s intent differs from culture to culture, but their stories share many similarities, spanning from Nigerian folklore (Madam Koi Koi) and Japanese folklore (Onryō, Goryō, or Kuchisake-onna) to Latin American folklore (La Llorona) and Navajo mythology (Chindi).

In his latest film, The Woman in the Yard, director Jaume Collet-Serra takes inspiration from this shared folkloric and mythological tale to create a horror film concerning the presence of a highly similar spirit. The film opens with Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) watching a video of her partner, David (Russell Hornsby), on a loop; footage that concerns a dream he had regarding their ideal life together. This repetitive action immediately gives the impression that David’s passed away, and based on how her son Taylor (Peyton Jackson) handles the subsequent conversation with her and how her daughter Annie (Estella Kahiha) relies on her imagination as a form of escapism, their collective process of navigating through grief hasn’t been pleasant, but what’s this? Ramona is equipped with a leg brace and stitches that run up her leg. Could David’s death have been recent?

After this brief opening, Collet-Serra (The Shallows) crafts an introduction composed of ethereal malaise and psychological instability through the use of dialogue, body language, compositional framing, and everyone’s favourite cinematic technique, CGI (lots of it). Effects are used to blur Ramona’s surroundings while all sound, including language, is muffled to near incoherence, as well as bits of what appear to be repressed trauma slip through the cracks and flood her mind, causing further dissociation, morphing her environment into the very memory that haunts her, only to come to shortly after and find that there’s a woman in the yard. Title drop!

The Woman (Okwui Okpokwasili), much like the vengeful spirits of stories from civilisations of yore, seeks to claim their lives. Questions began to flood my mind as to who this spirit was. Is she a mistress of David who also died, possibly by Ramona, out to seek vengeance? Was she someone that may have been wronged by Ramona, or maybe even David, and now the spirit desires more? Is she a relative that died and had an improper burial? Is there no connection between The Woman and the family at all, and this just so happens to be a wandering spirit, like La Llorona, claiming the lives of others as a means to take away what they have lost when they were a living entity? I began playing with these questions and others in my mind, yet my playful inquisition was set abruptly aside when the woman began to portray the extent of her ghastly abilities.

Her shadow can grow, distort itself, and interact with the physical realm, and it’s presented in a manner reminiscent of Count Orlok’s shadow in the many iterations of Nosferatu and presented in good old German Expressionist fashion no less, but through the approach of VFX rather than the manipulation of actual light. She can possess the mind of someone else, causing the swell of emotions from the collective unconscious and the thoughts kindled by their presence stored away in one’s shadow to flood one’s mind, which is presented in a similar manner to Ramona’s hallucinatory dissociation we saw at the start of the film. I was intrigued. However, that quickly dissipated, as what followed was a display of screenwriter Sam Stefanak’s indecisiveness on where to take The Woman, as well as the overall narrative.

I’ll be blunt: The Woman in the Yard is a sloppy mess. Stefanak subtly presents the woman’s folkloric and mythological roots via intent and desire early on, but that idea is short-lived. It begins to contort itself and the rest of the movie towards something more psychological in nature, eradicating any traces of its original identity in an instant, and this contortion is presented through a sequence of VFX that are accompanied by quick cuts and bloated imagery haphazardly slapped onto the film to give the appearance of depth rather than actually having any. It leaves what’s being presented to us highly confusing and random. Through these narrative rings of fire that I was forced to jump through, Stefanak creates a rather large plot hole, formed from the contrast of what The Woman and her presence were earlier in the film to what they become by the end of it.

The questions that once flooded my mind were replaced with a new slew of questions, such as “Is Stefanak even remotely familiar with how analytic psychology works?” and “Did anyone read this screenplay before making it?” And to make matters worse, to cover up its mess of a script, Collet-Serra decides it would be best to tack on a collection of thrills, chases, and chills meant to titillate audiences as a form of distraction. Unfortunately for him, it doesn’t work, as these sporadic elements of horror are approached in a rather rudimentary and lethargic manner. Not even the film’s sound design made these moments of mismanaged terror the least bit enticing.

The Woman in the Yard’s characterisations don’t go much further than how they’re presented in the beginning of the film, but thankfully they don’t need to. Their interactions with one another after facing the absurd are more than enough to present something worth fixating on, as the actors who play Ramona, Taylor, and Annie are proficient in playing archetypal roles and showcasing the emotional and psychological strain that comes at the cost of facing the cold silence of the universe. It was one of two elements of the film that kept my interest; the other being its cinematography.

Based on previous experience and the studio that put this film out, I assumed the compositional framing in The Woman in the Yard, like many contemporary horror movies, would’ve been mostly, primarily, or entirely comprised of triangular compositions where the subjects in frame are positioned in a direct, uninspired, and unchanging manner—much like It Follows (2014) and Longlegs (2024). However, I was pleasantly surprised to see variance in both its choices of framing and how the director of photography approached using the same frames, and when looking up who the cinematographer for The Woman in the Yard was, it began to make sense why this film looks so good.

Pawel Pogorzelski, the man being the look of auteur Ari Aster films (Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau is Afraid), employs a variety of shots that perfectly balance the figures in frame and, when necessary, facilitates the increasing tension and dread formed by the presence of The Woman. Shots utilising the golden ratio, a traditional use of the rule of thirds, triangular composition, hyper-dynamic close-ups, etc, are used to provide visual complement throughout the runtime.

My favourite shot came early on, where Ramona wanted to defuse a situation that just occurred between her and her son, Taylor, sitting in an armchair, faced towards a window, annoyed, while Ramona stands in a doorway frame. This shot is framed on its side with Ramona to the right of the shot, and the items and subjects within the shot are sequenced in a way that shows the golden ratio in full effect. Unfortunately, that’s all that The Woman in the Yard had to offer that kept me going throughout its tired and messy script. Otherwise, I would’ve left the theatre long before.

Sadly, The Woman in the Yard is a typical Blumhouse production and another horror film that poorly writes and executes the protagonist overcoming their repressed trauma and conquering their psychological hurdles. The latter’s so poorly executed that it makes films such as The Machinist (2004) and Shutter Island (2010) feel less shallow by comparison. It’s a film composed of artificial sweeteners and harmful food dye rather than something well-crafted, rich, and flavourful. Sure, it has cool VFX, but visuals alone aren’t enough to satiate me, especially for the film’s genre classification, seeing how profound the emotion of fear is and how well one can write and design around it.

USA | 2025 | 87 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Jaume Collet-Serra.
writer: Sam Stefanak.
starring: Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Russell Hornsby, Peyton Jackson & Estella Kahiha.