The Woman in the Yard: not your garden variety trauma horror

The first uncanny figure that appears in The Woman in the Yard is a ghost in the machine: an iPhone recording of  David (Russell Hornsby), whose tragic death in a car accident has left his wife Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) badly injured, buckling on shattered legs beneath the weight of the payments on the isolated and increasingly dilapidated farmhouse they’d purchased together as a live-in fixer-upper.  

The second apparition arrives soon afterwards and is harder to peg: a slender figure in a long black veil, plunked down in a chair at the edge of the property. “Mom, there’s a woman in the yard,” says teenaged Taylor (Peyton Jackson), while his little sister Annie (Estella Kahiha) cranes her neck to look through the kitchen window. Taylor suggests getting his Dad’s gun; Ramona staggers out the front door to try some diplomacy. “How did I get here?” asks the woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) in a strangely multifarious voice. It’s not at all clear if it’s a rhetorical question. 

This image of a damaged, desperate family staring down an incongruously Gothic presence in broad Georgia daylight is disarming: it evokes a sturdy supernatural tradition – that of the Old, Weird America – in a specific and beguiling new configuration. Scene-setting and spatial gamesmanship are the name of the game in The Woman in the Yard. 

Returning to the horror genre for the first time since Orphan (2009) – notwithstanding the shark-attack survivalism of The Shallows (2016) – Jaume Collet-Serra spreads out and makes himself at home. Domestic settings suit him, from the uncanny mannequins of House of Wax (2005) to the breakfast-nook existentialism of The Commuter (2018); he’s more likely to try to inhabit genre tropes than elevate them. Here, working from a screenplay by Sam Stefanak, the director exercises his natural-born expressionism, orchestrating the material in swift, vigorous scherzos of light and shadow. When a phantom hand creeps up the side of the porch to tickle some wind chimes, it’s more gorgeously sepulchral than anything in Nosferatu (2024); the impression is of reality slipping helplessly through its own outstretched fingers.  

It’s tempting, perhaps, to say that all this bravura technique is merely decorative, or to skim the particulars of the storyline – dead spouse; squirrelly family dynamics; a vaporous sense of threat – and dismiss The Woman in the Yard as another just-add-water exercise in post-millennial trauma-mongering. That the film’s cinematographer is Pawel Pogorzelski, who shot Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), might reinforce that idea. But the film operates differently: rather than trying to fake the audience out, Collet-Serra and Stefanak keep their revelations, and the underlying emotions of despair, in plain view, a strategy literalised by the woman’s implacable presence. 

The film’s mise-en-scene offers up successive and marvellous variations on sightlines and subjectivity, as well as a startling multiplicity of literal and figurative mirror images: match cuts, twinned compositions and one of the only actually imaginative Shining references in recent memory – a nod that gets at the real source of anxiety, which is the razor-dance between personal distress and parental responsibility. 

Deadwyler, who played a tough cop in Collet-Serra’s Netflix hit Carry-On (2024), is terrific in a role wholly dependent on body language. Where the script is occasionally too declarative, Deadwyler lets us read between the lines. She’s also a key collaborator in another way. Ramona is an artist, and critic Robert Sweeney has pointed out that the character’s multi-format self-portraits – computer print-outs layered with tactile physical materials – were actually created by Deadwyler and integrated after Deadwyler signed on as an executive producer. 

The art suggests the depth of her commitment to a project foregrounding what Deadwyler calls, in her artist’s statement, ‘Black Americana chaos’, and creates a vital context for Okpokwasili’s amazing physical performance, which suggests nothing so much as an abstract painting liberated from its canvas. Both actresses do some of their finest work in silhouette; a late two-shot is marked by a shivery, insidious intimacy beyond the purview of most studio horror pictures. The Woman in the Yard is not above jump scares but it’s not bound to them either; the final act operates according to its own bold, oneiric visual logic. It skirts incoherence, which in this context is a compliment; it’s nice to watch something so untethered.   

 “I am the dark corners of your mind,” says the Woman at one point, a  sinister paraphrase of the lyrics to “The Way We Were” in a movie with, seemingly, two overt allusions to the cinema of Barbra Streisand (somebody needs to ask Collet-Serra about this apparent motif  in an interview).  The line offers a pretty good summation of a movie that works best as a guided tour through treacherous physical and psychic space – one that emerges out the other side in the vicinity of grace, for Ramona, and also for the audience.  

► The Woman in the Yard is in UK cinemas now.