Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (June 4, 2025)
Given its vague title, 2025’s The Woman in the Yard could exist in a variety of genres. As one look at the Blu-ray cover to the left implies, however, this one delivers a horror tale.
A car accident left Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) disabled and killed her husband David (Russell Hornsby). While she cares for their kids Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and Annie (Estella Kahiha), she struggles with her own depression issues and seems distant toward them.
One day a mysterious woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) draped all in black appears on their lawn and utters cryptic messages. This rattles the family and sends Ramona down a dark and ominous journey to keep her children safe.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra launched his career with 2005’s House of Wax, a low-budget horror flick. 20 years later, Collet-Serra finds himself with Yard, another low-budget horror flick.
This doesn’t indicate that Collet-Serra remained stuck in neutral over the prior two decades, however. Indeed, with films like 2021’s Jungle Cruise and 2022’s Black Adam, he got his shot at expensive “tentpole movies”.
While neither of those truly flopped, both disappointed at the box office. Collet-Serra’s hits all come from lower budget projects, so perhaps he simply functions best with financial restrictions.
Which became the case for Yard. Given its $12 million cost, Collet-Serra went back to the penny-pinching ways of successes like 2009’s Orphan and 2016’s The Shallows.
Alas, given a total gross of about $23 million, Yard didn’t produce notable revenue. I can’t call that a shame, as the movie feels like a collection of cinematic gimmicks in search of a plot.
Not that the basic premise lacks promise. The notion of a mysterious woman covered entirely in funeral garb who just pops up one day and mutters eerie notions certainly seems plenty creepy.
Unfortunately, Collet-Serra lacks confidence in the inherent power of the concept. Rather than let matters evolve in a “slow boil” manner, he ladles out “scary” filmmaking choices from the very start.
These handicap the end product. When a director uses every trick in his bag out of the gate, he lacks anywhere to go when the movie needs to launch into a higher gear.
Thus my view that Collet-Serra doesn’t seem to feel he can connect with the audience if he goes down a more subdued path. He appears to think that if he allows Yard to take a more subtle approach, it’ll flop.
And in his hands, maybe it would. Perhaps this story needs a more skilled director.
Nonetheless, I wish he’d tried. As much as I complain about the standard cheap scare tactics typical of so many horror flicks, those methods make sense for some stories.
But not this one. If ever a thriller needed the understated “slow burn” approach, Yard would be the case.
Unfortunately, in Collet-Serra’s hands, we get tons of jump scares, Dutch angles and supposedly creepy musical cues. All of these work overtime to provide terror that never quite arrives.
It doesn’t help that Yard awkwardly straddles the genres of psychological horror and family drama. It caroms from tensions related to the mysterious titular visitor and clumsy mawkishness related to the emotional recovery among Ramona, Taylor and Annie.
The two sides fail to connect, and matters deteriorate as the story progresses. Rather than ratchet up the tension, the narrative simply becomes clumsier and more cliché-filled.
When a scary movie gets less dramatic and compelling as it goes, we call that a “bad thing”. Yard never degenerates to such a degree that it turns into an embarrassment, but its lack of creativity makes it a dull stab at a thriller.
