Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) lives with her two children, Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and Annie (Estella Kahiha), on the large farmhouse fixer upper that she bought with her husband, David (Russell Hornsby), who has since lost his life in a car accident that left Ramona injured.  One morning, the grieving family notices a strange woman (Okwui Okpokwasili), dressed all in flowing black, has set up a chair in their yard and is watching the house.  As the day wears on into evening, the woman seems to be getting closer and closer to the house, and the family still have frightfully few answers about who she is or why she is there. 

Jaume Collet-Serra directs the close-knit horror, The Woman in the Yard for Blumhouse from a script penned by Sam Stefanak.  Running a brief 88 minutes, cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski – the favored lensman of Ari Aster – offers audiences plenty of unsettling, daylit imagery which is then tautly assembled in the editing suite by Timothy Alverson and Krisztian Majdik.  While there are a few jump scares throughout and a nasty scene in which Ramona is picking at her stitches, Stefanak and Collet-Serra are more interested in themes than they are the guts and gore. 

This deep into the “elevated horror” phenomenon, it is clear as day from the opening scene as Ramona watches old videos on her phone of David – who we do not yet even have full confirmation that he is deceased – that the titular woman who is not yet in the yard will be grief personified.  While in lesser hands, we would simply be waiting for the big reveal and, if we were feeling generous, feign some bit of surprise or shock, but the team behind the film are playing with the form and the expectations enough that we do not feel like this is a complete recycling of the same old ideas.  Towards the third act, the camera and the edit, while always interesting, does get a little superfluous and some of the details of the where, when, and how get lost, but we are left with enough of a general sense of place that we do not turn our backs on the film; it is just frustrating that the finale is so sloppy compared to the rather metered approach to the setup and rising action. This also makes the film feel much longer than it is because the filmmakers have stretched a beautifully simple conceit to its absolute limit, and though they do then try to redefine what the film is, it loses the streamlined charm which it had established.

Focusing on what works, Collett-Serra teases out a strong performance from the small cast, and while Deadwiler’s Ramona shoulders much of the emotional weight and has the most to do in the film, Jackson adeptly navigates Taylor’s arc as a boy who has lost his father and taken on the role of “man of the house” without the opportunity to properly grieve. Additionally, Kahiha is rewarded by the screenwriters in having to fill the shoes of the oftentimes insufferable child in a horror movie role that is not totally used just to get the rest of the crew deeper into trouble.  The strained dynamics of this family is what drives the front two thirds of the film, spurred into furious motion from the woman in the yard, but these tensions have clearly been long simmering and have now come to a head.  In this way, using grief as the monster works because we see the real impact of it on this family and the stress of loss, the stress of taking on responsibilities far beyond one’s age – in both Ramona, who now finds herself a single mother of two, and Taylor’s case – is a far more interesting story to follow than merely a shadow creature that lurks just our of frame.

Where The Woman in the Yard begins to stumble is when it tries to deepen and expand its monster’s role in this story, not only because it overcomplicated itself but also in the way it broadens her impact on the story is quite unsavory and a little clumsily handled, bordering on exploitative.  As a supernatural being, the woman’s strength is her simplicity; though her lack of surrounding lore which, albeit, would have set the film on a different trajectory, it could be argued would have been a more interesting approach to take while still incorporating the themes that drove Stefanak to put this tale to paper in the first place. As presented, she is just what the title tells us she would be, a stranger in a funeral veil, largely silent, and sitting at the edge of the yard, creeping closer.  As she nears the house, she is able to move her shadow through the light that creeps in from the windows and act as a poltergeist, or a more malicious Peter Pan, as she closes doors, clings against chandeliers, and shatters the dishes, sending the family into a fierce state of terror.  This is all fine enough and creates for some simple yet fitting scares that all add to the uncomfortable ambience that lingers after a funeral, but then Stefanak begins to transition the woman’s presence as something the three of them shared in and into a figment of Ramona’s depression.  Beyond that, the woman unlocks a separate “mirror world” for Ramona, and this is where the story begins to lose its grip thematically in how it treats depression and suicide, and narratively in what it is trying to accomplish.  It almost seems to cosign off on the idea that Ramona’s children will be fine if she does die by suicide, and while it is a thrilling scene that the woman and the mother share in the bedroom and later the garage, it feels wrong.  It does not delve deep enough into Ramona nor give us enough of a runway after to justify its shrug-like attitude towards depression or suicide and the lasting effects that it can have. 

While far from a perfect film, The Woman in the Yard offers enough of an unsettling ambience to satisfy, though it’s scariest scene comes when it appears the narrative will reset to be seen through the woman’s point of view! Thankfully, that fake out quickly fades away back into a more linear structure, and while the introduction of the mirror world does not meet the same standards set that the more creeping anxiety of the first half does, it is a strong effort from one of the more steady hands that are currently turning the screw of the thriller genre.  With precisely realized productions design led by Marc Fisichella, The Woman in the Yard presents itself as a fully competent entry into this specific  strand of modern horror that is also operating with indie sensibilities.  It may not be the best version of itself, but there is enough craft that will keep audiences engaged and it tiptoes just to the line of its PG13 rating so that horror heads can enjoy this film with the next up and coming generation, too.  A sharper and more focused idea about what the woman is and the rules of the world would have greatly improved the film, but as presented, it paints a portrait of grief and a portrait of pain, but because the filmmakers – to push this metaphor to its breaking point – opted to share a single canvas for everything they wished to tackle, the details are not as deep as we would like to see, but nevertheless, they still painted a pleasant enough picture that afterwards still comes to mind as a neat and engaging work, even if we had to squint our eyes at times to make sense of it all.