The Woman in the Yard Review: Family Horror

As a psychological horror movie, The Woman in the Yard trades traditional scares for a quiet, gripping, devastating family drama.

The setup is very simple: Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler, of The Piano Lesson) is recovering from a car crash that killed her husband (Russell Hornsby, of Creed II) and left her handicapped. She and her two children (Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahiha) mourn in their new, somewhat unfinished rural farmhouse. During a power outage, a strange, black-cloaked woman (Okwui Okpokwasili, of The Exorcist: Believer) appears on their lawn. Just… sitting there, giving a vague, ominous warning, while this troubled family’s fractures begin to grow dangerously large as a result.

That’s the big thing to keep in mind: The Woman in the Yard is not the typical big, loud, “fun” horror film you’d probably expect, and it’s not even rated R. It’s a slow, uncomfortable, character-driven family drama that’s bolstered by its horror elements, the latter of which only really take more prominence in the back half. Director Jaume Collet-Serra has come back to his horror roots, but he remarkably maintains a quiet, melancholic tone. You feel the love but also the boiling tension among this family, even when they barely say a word to each other, because of how confident the movie is in its visual storytelling and pacing.

Of course, the acting is crucial to that as well. Danielle Deadwyler joins this year’s nominees for Best Performance That Will Never Get Oscar Buzz Because it’s a Horror Movie. The palpable, struggling mix of motherly love and pain is brutal to continuously watch, as is the physical performance as she spends the entire movie walking on crutches and emotionally exhausted. She makes many questionable choices, but any parent would slip up under her circumstances, let alone someone like her who is slowly revealed to be fighting a much darker battle within herself than we initially think.

Her kids are the same way, especially her son. He’s often a disobedient punk, but given the grief he’s feeling, the fact that most kids his age behave that way, and the scariness of the situation – all conveyed greatly by Peyton Jackson – he’s still a flawed, fleshed-out character you want to come out unharmed. What little we see of the father lets us understand his point of view too, even if we disagree with it. And when you throw everyone in a situation where they’re isolated, they have no power, and no one can even drive away, you get a pressure cooker of searing drama.

Notice how I’ve yet to mention what the woman in the yard herself actually does. That’s what makes the early portion of this movie so fascinating. Just by being there and showing one person a single threatening image, she wields her mysterious power over everyone and lets them deteriorate on their own. I love how cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski only frames her from the characters’ points of view at first, when her outline is small, distant, and therefore more imposing, much like the greater danger she soon represents.

She’s not scary if you just stare at her out of context, but she looms over everyone in broad daylight with so few signs of what she’s actually there to do, and it gets under your skin more and more by the minute even when she’s not on the screen. The way her literal shadow can crawl around the house also makes for some simple but creepy imagery right out of some classic ghost movies from the black-and-white days. My only gripe is that she shows her face far too early, but Okpokwasili’s performance somewhat makes up for that.

It’s the second half of the film that I can see losing some people. For one thing, it’s a bit more “traditional” with its horror (but still restrained compared to other movies), which may turn away anyone who loved the purely familial aspect. For another, it delves into what this woman is and how she’s connected to Ramona. The Woman in the Yard gets more surreal and symbolic than I was expecting, most notably in how it plays with reflections and what might pass as literal and figurative mirror dimensions.

This is my favorite type of horror movie, where the overt threat is directly connected to the psychological state of the characters. The film’s symbolic nature is obvious once you catch onto who/what the woman in the yard is, but the way it builds on that connection, playing with perspectives, angles, and even characters’ sense of time and space, keeps tying everything back to the characters’ sorrows in downright upsetting ways. As for the final payoff… I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. I feel like you could look at it one of two ways, one of which I’m still trying to unpack a bit. But both feel fitting as the conclusion to an emotional arc that’s been explored through scares and drama.

Even before the whole embargo situation, I really didn’t have many expectations for The Woman in the Yard, and those expectations had plummeted by the time I walked in. So, it’s possible I may be overhyping it because of how much it surpassed that low bar. But when just thinking about it immediately takes me back to that uncomfortable feeling I had in the moment, I have to think there’s more to it than that. I’ve never even had any strong feelings towards Jaume Collet-Serra as a filmmaker in the past, but he really excels here, along with a sharp debut feature-length screenplay from Sam Stefanak. Maybe the broader critical reaction will be less enthused, but this just hit all my sweet spots and really shook me.

The Woman in the Yard will be released in US theatres, in UK & Irish cinemas, and worldwide on March 28, 2025.