While horror films function as an important part of this writer’s interest in cinema, it’s been hard not to feel some growing personal contempt for the genre. The reason being not just the high/low budget demands of the market over-saturating us, but the punishing self-awareness of Gen X and Millennial genre nerds now making them and the post-Get Out flop sweat over needing “metaphor.” So when a new horror film is not just kind of good, but also genuinely scary and tense, it’s cause for celebration. Such is the case with the modest proposal that is The Woman in the Yard.
With the film, perhaps the point of interest for cinephiles will be a return to the genre by once-heralded Orphan craftsman Jaume Collet-Serra, but this low-stakes PG-13 horror picture won’t come with much in the way of expectation for anyone else. That’s why it serves as such a pleasant surprise, and a nice reminder that Collet-Serra’s muscles hadn’t atrophied over multiple Dwayne Johnson behemoths in recent years.
On the page, the setup of the film isn’t completely original; a death hovers over a family, and through supernatural strife, they must come together and heal their wounds. Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) is recovering from the death of the family patriarch (Russell Hornsby), who seemed to have basically strong-armed the family into moving from the city to a rural farmhouse. Ramona has to tend to two children, hot-headed teenager Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and scaredy little kid Annie (Estella Kahiha), in a crumbling house with no food or electricity while overdue bills rack up and she recovers from a severely injured leg. The initial scenes feature some clumsy dialogue, but I believed every second of the simultaneous tension and dead air that hung over the grieving family home, thanks to the director’s steady pacing and strength with young actors.
In the middle of this tense day with no electricity, things get worse when a lone woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) covered in a black veil appears in the middle of their large yard. Offering cryptic warnings that pertain to Ramona’s past, her eerie sight begins to drive the home to paranoia and madness without even flicking her wrist. Her visage in broad daylight offers an extra creepy twist that hits harder than a lot of recent horror imagery.
Busting out all the stops via wide-angle lenses, digitally-assisted camera movements, strategic deployment of master shots, and basically any opportunity to rack focus imaginable, Collet-Serra makes a lot out of what, with a few minor adjustments, probably could’ve even been a play. Even the few requisite jump scares are delivered with such skill that you don’t feel bad about them getting you. The director’s form is additionally assisted by his performers; Deadwyler’s large expressive eyes and Okpokwasili’s sharp cheekbones cast as much a spell as the occasional forays into computer-generated expressionism.
But the true achievement of The Woman in the Yard is how much it sticks to its guns. This writer kept feeling tense that the film was going to fumble things by eventually explaining its supernatural conceit. It’s true that the metaphor itself becomes pretty clear by the end, which also, in turn, overextends its third act a little. But the terrible twist I was afraid of never actually came. Maybe the film isn’t that perceptive about the subject it is tackling, but it never strays from the belief that you have to feel it through form, rather than it being spelled out.
The Woman in the Yard is now in theaters.