THE STORY – Ramona becomes crippled by grief after her husband dies in a car accident, leaving her to care for her two children alone in her rural farmhouse. Her sadness soon turns to fear when a spectral woman in black appears on her front lawn, warning her “today’s the day.” As the mysterious figure creeps closer and closer to the house, Ramona realizes she must protect her children from the evil woman who simply won’t leave them alone.
THE CAST – Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Russell Hornsby, Peyton Jackson & Estella Kahiha
THE TEAM – Jaume Collet-Serra (Director) & Sam Stefanak (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 87 Minutes
Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) hasn’t been doing well since her husband (Russell Hornsby) died. The flowers sent for condolences have dried in their vases; there’s no more dog food left and her own injuries from the car crash that claimed her husband’s life have made getting around their fixer-upper farmhouse incredibly difficult and painful. And on top of all that, the power has gone out, and she’s exhausted her cell phone battery watching a video of her husband over and over. She can’t call anyone for help, but thankfully, a woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) in head-to-toe black has appeared in their front yard, sitting on a chair. When Ramona tries to find out who she is, the woman responds in what sounds like an addled state of mind, but when she demands that the woman remove herself from her property, the woman’s reply stops Ramona dead in her tracks: “You called, and I came. Today’s the day.” Will Ramona be able to protect herself and her children, Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and Annie (Estella Kahiha), from this mysterious woman? And what does she want with Ramona anyway?
It’s obvious from practically the first time she appears what the woman in the yard is meant to represent. What’s far less clear is what, exactly, she is in the context of the story. One’s reaction to “The Woman in the Yard” as a whole will likely rest on whether or not that matters to you and how much unexplained supernatural gobbledygook you can tolerate. For most of the film’s brisk runtime, she’s not much more than a haunting presence, sitting in her chair exuding the menacing aura of a human body without a visible face. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski has a lot of fun framing her in all sorts of discomfiting compositions, making expert use of hanging laundry to obscure her and give a good jump scare. When she finally gets up from her chair and removes her shroud in the film’s second half, she loses none of her capacity to cause fear, thanks to Okpokwasili’s menacingly regal presence and some fun scares involving her “Nosferatu“-like shadow. However, in the film’s last act, neither director Jaume Collet-Serra (“Carry-On“) nor screenwriter Sam Stefanak has fully worked out what she’s actually supposed to be beyond what she represents. The film goes fully off the rails, taking Ramona on a trippy journey that raises far more questions than it answers about what the hell is going on, leading to a “but is that what really happened?” ending that fits in the genre but feels like a cheap cop-out.
Before that grand finale, though, “The Woman in the Yard” is an incredibly entertaining watch. The plot’s simplicity makes it feel like an adaptation of a short story – the film’s story and premise are one and the same, with no extraneous plot threads, characters, or themes. Collet-Serra, a master at making single-location thrillers pulse with energy and creative spirit, throws everything in his bag of tricks on the screen to make it work – canted angles, lens flares, off-kilter compositions, mirror tricks – and when the film’s editing gets too hyperactive, it all becomes much too much. That happens rarely, though, as much of the film’s first half is a master class in rising tension and patient storytelling. At times, all this style feels like the director desperately trying to make a more artsy screenplay into something more mainstream, but it works. The camerawork keeps you on your toes, constantly throwing surprising shots at you that make it hard to get a firm grasp on the film’s reality. The bonkers sound mix bumps up random noises to unbearable levels (a bouncing ball has never sounded so loud), leading to some intensely effective use of both sound and silence. Unfortunately, when everything gets dialed up to eleven for the film’s last act, it makes the action much more difficult to follow.
Thankfully, the film has Danielle Deadwyler as its rock-steady center. No matter how messy the film gets, Deadwyler’s performance makes Ramona’s emotional arc crystal clear. Stefanak’s screenplay goes to some surprisingly dark places for a mainstream movie, and Deadwyler makes Ramona’s bone-deep depression feel crushingly real. While the films themselves couldn’t be more different, the emotional acuity of her performance unmistakably comes from the woman who unjustly missed out on an Oscar nomination for her heartbreaking work in “Till.” The series of revelations about Ramona doled out sparingly throughout the entire film, all land with stunning force thanks to the piercing clarity found in her eyes. She sows all the seeds of Ramona’s arc in her first scene, and when they finally sprout, it makes for some beautiful moments. There’s no doubt about it now: Danielle Deadwyler isn’t just a great actress; she’s a movie star, capable of not just leading a film but elevating it just with her mere presence. “The Woman in the Yard” certainly isn’t awful, but it’s Deadwyler who ensures that it isn’t a mere B-movie thrill ride. In her hands, it’s also an emotional character study about the inability to move on after tragedy.
