THE WOMAN IN THE YARD. Psychodrama pretending to be horror

The Woman in the Yard was marketed as a horror film, but there isn’t a single ounce of horror in it.

Ramona is raising two children on her own—little Annie and teenage Taylor—in a remote house built by her husband, who died in a car accident. Ramona is unable to cope with the trauma: she spends most of the day in bed, falls behind on bills, forgets to shop or cook, and is emotionally distant, unable to communicate with her son and daughter. One day, the family notices a black-clad, masked woman sitting motionless on a chair in the yard, staring into their windows. The woman mysteriously declares that “today is the day,” and all attempts to drive her away fail. Ramona cannot call the police because of a power outage, and the nearest neighbor lives several kilometers away.

To make matters worse, strange phenomena begin to occur: some powerful force moves the furniture, the family dog disappears under mysterious circumstances, and the figure in black draws closer to the house with each passing hour.

Spanish-American director Jaume Collet-Serra is best known for his action films [Unknown (2011), Non-Stop (2014), Run All Night (2015), The Commuter (2018), Carry-On (2024)] and horror films [House of Wax (2005), Orphan (2009), The Shallows (2016)], but his filmography also includes movie-like products such as Jungle Cruise (2021) and Black Adam (2022); the former was based on a Disney theme park “attraction” (!), the latter on a DC comic. Both are exactly like their source material: loud, garish, childish, and devoid of meaning—but certainly profitable. In contrast, The Woman in the Yard, written by Sam Stefanak, is Collet-Serra’s first attempt at a serious psychological thriller masquerading as a haunted-house horror. Unfortunately, it showcases all the director’s worst qualities, above all his superficiality.

The premise is fairly intriguing: the audience is initially curious about the identity and motives of the titular figure, who herself is sketched in an interesting way and well played by Nigerian-American actress Okwui Okpokwasili, who somewhat resembles Grace Jones.

Collet-Serra handles the buildup of tension, ambiguity, and a sense of isolation quite well in the first part of the film; which makes it all the more surprising that, in the second half, he sacrifices all of that on the altar of jump scares and plot twists worthy of the worst teen horror flicks. But the greatest weakness of The Woman in the Yard is its heavy-handedness, which leaves the audience no room for interpretation, as the filmmakers hammer home their themes with all the subtlety of a pneumatic drill. Once the cards are laid bare, the story starts drifting aimlessly—until a finale that was perhaps meant to be emotionally shattering but turns out to be a tired cliché straight out of M. Night Shyamalan’s playbook. This is not a horror film—it’s cheap psychodrama.