When I pick up the phone and call a friend from home, there’s regularly the same routine. “I didn’t recognize the number, but then I remembered—you still have a landline.”
Damn right I do and, while it may seem like a needless expense, should I ever find myself in a situation like Danielle Deadwyler does in the new Blumhouse horror picture The Woman in the Yard, I’ll suffer none of her woes. The minute I am faced with an eerily existential threat looming outside of my metaphorically half-remodeled farmhouse, I’ll be able to call the police—and that’s even if my all-consuming grief has left me unable to pay the electric bill or put gas in the car, thus nixing any method of charging up my powerless cell phone.
This is the predicament Deadwyler’s Ramona finds herself in at the top of Jaume Collet-Serra’s kinda-dopey-but-weirdly-effective new film. We meet her mid-bed rot, draining that phone’s battery watching a video of someone we quickly deduce is (or was) her husband. When she finally gets up with a leg in an elaborate brace and mutters “please give me strength,” it’s easy to deduce that she is the lone survivor of a recent accident. Yet there are still two children—Tay (Peyton Jackson), still in his early teens but old enough to be stepping toward defiance, and adorable moppet Annie (Estella Kahiha)—that both need mothering.
The morning routine is hampered at first by a lack of electricity (but for some reason Ramona says it will “come back” tonight, which makes no sense) but then gets weird when a woman draped in thin billowy fabric shows up and looms outside the kitchen window. This figure soon presents itself to be some sort of supernatural and malicious force. (The dog barking like crazy is our first clue.) Rotten time to be on crutches with no working phone!
While Sam Stefanak’s script is written with a near-preternatural lack of originality, The Woman in the Yard succeeds (somewhat) due to Deadwyler’s sympathetic performance and Collet-Serra’s knack for sharp camera placement, evocative lighting and the occasional show-off camera move. (With this and the recent airport-set Netflix thriller Carry-On, the director of Orphan and The Shallows is back on sturdier footing than with his disastrous attempt at a superhero film, Black Adam.) Sure, there are some cheap jump scares and unexplained visions that come out of nowhere accompanied by a loud noise, but they are at least done pretty well.
I am not going to bother explaining what the titular woman represents (if you’ve seen any horror movie post-Babadook you can probably figure it out) but I can’t deny that The Woman in the Yard has a pretty lazy attitude toward explaining or even showcasing its inner logic. A supernatural or fantasy film can only work when we know its rules. Unless I completely zoned out for a bit, which is unlikely considering the 87-minute running time, I have no idea how Ramona discovered that only if a room was “completely dark” would it be safe from the being that possessed malevolent powers.
Indeed, once the first hour—a pretty taut exercise in tension—gives way to action, the film becomes an avalanche of “and now some crazy stuff is gonna’ happen.” There’s a lot of running and weird visions and stepping into different realities—a real “throw it all against the wall” approach. Much of it looks cool, but the haphazard storytelling quickly becomes a little irritating, not to mention confusing. No lie, I would not be surprised if I soon got an email from the studio apologizing that the reels were out of order during the press screening. (Said press screening happening several hours after the movie opened to the general public—rarely a good sign!)
Still, despite the baffling third act and one of those final moments that make you shout “wait, what?!?!” I’m still somewhat pro on The Woman in the Yard. Danielle Deadwyler, an executive producer on the project, is a real tour-de-force in this, and milks her scenes of desperation and despair for all they are worth. This is a movie loaded with shortcuts but she’s not taking any of them.
