The Woman in the Yard (2025)
“Your children are so darling… they look ripe enough to eat.”
The horror movie monster as metaphor for a huge emotional human concept like grief, trauma, or depression is certainly not anything new, though recent films like Hereditary and The Babadook have done so pretty definitively. It’s fertile ground for horror and Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Woman in the Yard is happy to till its way into that cinematic soil.
Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) is recovering in her country home following a car accident that took the life of her husband David (Russell Hornsby). Relying on her teenage son Taylor (Peyton Jackson) to do a lot of the day-to-day duties, including watching younger sister Annie (Estella Kahiha), Ramona is clearly in a bad place when a mysterious woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) shows up on her front lawn.
The woman, dressed in black and draped with a black veil, tells Ramona that she’s here because she was summoned, but remains vague about her intentions. It becomes quickly apparent that the woman possesses supernatural powers of some sort, but her threat factor doesn’t increase until she begins moving closer to the house. Taylor is convinced that his mother knows the woman and is keeping secrets from him and his sister, and it isn’t long before he’s proven right.
The film feels like a short that has been agonizingly expanded in the first two acts to justify its (barely) feature length running time. The problem with protecting the titular lady’s motives in order to score a “big reveal” in the third act is that most audience members will have arrived at the conclusion prior to the film getting there. Honestly, anyone who has paid attention to the trailer might even have gotten most of the way there before arriving at the theater.
The Woman in the Yard also shares a ton of DNA with last year’s Never Let Go with Halle Berry—single black mother protecting her two children from a vague threat—to the point where having seen that movie could be considered a spoiler for this movie. It’s even stranger when you consider that both films are written and directed by men, and both have the same strange issue regarding single black mothers as family protectors. Not saying anything else, just saying it’s weird.
The film lacks an engine and forward momentum for so much of its running time that by the time it reaches cruising altitude, it has already begun its descent. In the age of Black Mirror and shorter-form genre storytelling, The Woman in the Yard simply doesn’t justify its existence as a theater-going experience. I don’t know if it was ever considered as a short, but even at 85 minutes it felt stretched to its breaking point.
Having said all of that, thank goodness for Danielle Deadwyler. The Atlanta native continues to be one of the most magnetic screen presences of the moment, and is the main reason the film is at all watchable in its first hour. Nigerian actress and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili definitely gets the assist with a mannered and creepy performance as the title character.
The Woman in the Yard, unfortunately, is not the kind of film that earns its ending. In fact, it’s so unearned, it had to have been written before the rest of the film because the script never would have gotten there organically. The imagery in the film’s climactic scene is very upsetting, has no business being in a PG-13 film, and absolutely did not merit inclusion in this particular film. Other films have earned the right to build to something truly horrifying in the final minutes, but The Woman in the Yard seems to be biding its time until it gets to its rug pull ending.
Part of the appeal of those great big twist movies like The Crying Game, The Usual Suspects, and The Sixth Sense is that those big reveals make you want to go back and watch the movie again to see all the clues you missed. This flick certainly doesn’t hinge on some huge final reveal, but rather drags its feet toward a foregone conclusion it thinks is mind-blowing. Unfortunately, despite the best intentions of all involved, The Woman in the Yard just doesn’t work.
Header image via Rotten Tomatoes