THE WOMAN IN THE YARD Review: Metaphors Are Exactly What They Seem to Be

Getting it out of the way, The Woman in the Yard isn’t a disappointing film, per se.

It’s merely disappointing as the latest outing of this particular director: Jaume Collet-Serra, an author who always had a keen eye and a skilled hand with curious, original, and sometimes outlandish concepts. At least when it came to horror and thrillers.

There is, sadly, nothing even remotely outlandish in this new film. No one turns out to be a secret psychopath from Estonia. There are no seagulls with fun names or spies who forgot they’re spies. Everything is exactly what it seems to be in The Woman in the Yard, including the myriads of metaphors scattered throughout the story Sure, they aren’t literal, but they still bear exactly the same meaning you think of when you see them.

A family lives on a farm after a tragedy strikes them. Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) has lost her husband in a car accident, which also left her physically traumatized. Ramona is reeling emotionally, forcing her older son, Taylor (Peyton Jackson), to bear the brunt of the main family responsibilities, including caring for the young daughter, Annie (Estella Kahiha).

Tensions are already running high, setting up the scene for an unexpected addition. One day, as promised by the title, a woman dressed fully in a pretty incredible Gothic-looking black getup (Okwui Okpokwasili) arrives in the yard and proclaims that “today is the day.”

While this setup, already shown in the trailer, does come off as genuinely creepy, it turns out there is nowhere to go from this point. Literally – for the most part, The Woman just sits in the yard, like Thanos, looking ominous and serving her obviously metaphoric purpose.

In a way that’s unusual for him, Collet-Serra aims for psychological exploration more than the physical scares this concept might produce. This, once again, sounds like a very promising idea that can go in so many directions; if only contemporary horror films haven’t already used it so many times in exactly the same fashion.

The motives of grief, guilt, and unresolved trauma are all over the film, starting from the remnants of the car from the collision that sticks out in the driveway like an unexploded bomb in the middle of the schoolyard in The Devil’s Backbone. The problem is that this bomb threatened to go off more than 20 years ago. And just the latest decade in genre cinema alone gave us multiple examples of horror films exploring similar motives, from The Babadook to Smile 2. Collet-Serra’s film goes through the necessary motions but doesn’t add anything particularly new to this narrative rather than 'yes, trauma can and will manifest itself in varying monstrous forms.'

The strongest suit of The Woman in the Yard is its visual looks, and this includes more than just the literal woman from the title. The cinematography helmed by the veteran Pawel Pogorzelski, known for Hereditary, Midsommar, and Fresh, is beautiful and sufficiently disorienting. The style builds up the appropriately grim atmosphere, even when the script doesn’t really allow many possibilities for this.

Unfortunately, what this fascinating and effective style doesn’t achieve is producing original ideas when there just aren’t any to begin with.

The film is now playing throughout North America, only in movie theaters. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.