‘The Woman in the Yard’ Review: We're Apparently Not Done With 'Mental Illness as Horror'

(TW: This review discussed depression and suicide ideation)

Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra has a filmography of great peaks and valleys. He brought us some of the most iconic 2000s horror with House of Wax and Orphan, a few mediocre Liam Neeson joints, then a couple of Dwayne Johnson misses in Jungle Cruise and Black Adam. For his newest outing, Collet-Serra is back in the horror business, this time giving us a monster a lot less iconic and corporeal than Esther. Though stunning and menacing in her black veil, Okwui Okpokwasili as The Woman stands as just another installment of horror villains as a manifestation of grief, one trapped in a movie with ill-defined rules and cowardice about its own themes.

Danielle Deadwyler leads as Ramona, a grieving widow struggling to keep up with her duties as a mother. Through an “orgy of evidence,” we learn that Romona has struggled to peel herself up, physically and emotionally, from a recent accident that took her husband from her, which leads to her home falling apart and her young son, Taylor (Peyton Jackson), having to pick up the slack. On a day when they’re power’s been cut, leaving them with no contact with the outside world, a strange woman appears on their farm’s lawn. Clad in a black dress and veil, seated comfortably on a chair, The Woman taunts the inquiring Romana with not much more than “today’s the day.” As the family of three (which includes Ramona’s daughter who struggles writing the letter “R” in the right direction) watches the menacing woman, cracks in their relationships widen until it becomes more apparent that maybe Ramona is, and has been, struggling mentally and The Woman is a living manifestation of her darker desires.

I almost wish it were even as simple as that, butThe Woman in the Yard seems to want to play it coy. Sam Stefanak’s script treats The Woman’s identity like a twist, one that takes too long to be revealed and thus alters the appearance of the conflict. Dream sequences, hallucinations, and flashbacks further undermine the stakes, the audience never knowing exactly what’s real and what there is to be afraid of. The Woman is a spooky presence not far beyond their door, but there’s no time for the movie to feel claustrophobic or for the threat to feel present, as times where the family is holed up in the living room are mostly padded with the aforementioned dream sequences and characters walking around outside to assess the situation. When she finally bares down on them, the family seems to have a plan for it not at all based in anything we’ve seen thus far, and one they abandon quickly as The Woman’s inconsistent powers seem to change for the sake of action. It’s unfortunately quite rough, and further fumbles when it chooses an ambiguous ending that (perhaps mercifully) avoids what the film tried to convince us was inevitable.

Ramona’s story is one of a struggling parent and widow whose illness is weaponized against her by her son (“She takes crazy person pills!”), further contributing to the overwhelming evidence that things for her are amiss. The dynamics of a family with a recently lost patriarch are the most compelling angle of the story; they force us to face the parent who is unable to parent, the oldest child struggling to fill the gaps, and the cluster of resentment that can flow through that. Collet-Serra seemed to want to create a sense of dread using fast cuts and shots of dead flowers and an unkempt home, while also furthering the audience’s assumption that Ramona is struggling, and The Woman is a manifestation of that. Flashbacks tell us that Ramona’s struggle might not be new; she is a depressed person, one who imagines a woman in black who might take her away. Suicide ideation is a personal experience and Ramona’s here is with a version of it working to convince her the world would be better off without her, but I am a bit wary of a portrayal of suicide as a warm embrace in a film that feels unable or unwilling to contend with the realities of it.

The Woman in the Yard fails on a lot of levels, firstly that it cannot deliver terrors as it consistently weakens its own rules and logic, which doesn’t allow the audience to keep up. It ramrods in some mirror symbolism and ideas about an inverted version of the family, which feel less lucid than “Through the Looking Glass,” which seems to have inspired it. But its worst offense is perhaps that it continues a tired line of trauma horror and instead of bringing anything innovative to the concept (like The Babadook or the Smile movies, for instance), instead shows cowardice in its approach which undermines its own themes the same way the structure undermines its scares.

The Woman in the Yard is in theaters March 28, 2025