Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra
Starring: Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Russell Hornsby, Peyton Jackson, Estella Kahiha
Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra is probably most
associated now with action thrillers, specifically those starring Liam
Neeson, but he started out in the horror genre with 2005's House of Wax. Collet-Serra now returns to horror with The Woman in the Yard, but it's a very different kind of horror movie to his slasher debut;
it's a movie rooted in character psychology, and the director handles it
surprisingly well, but he's ultimately hampered by a script that resorts
to over-explaining its theme, as so many mainstream American horror movies
are now wont to do.
The setup is straight out of the Shyamalan textbook, and like that
filmmaker, Collet-Serra displays the influence of Spielberg here. Our
protagonists are a classic broken Spielberg family, but not because of
divorce. Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) recently lost her husband
David (Russell Hornsby) in a car crash that has left her nursing a
broken leg and her children - teenager Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and
toddler Annie (Estella Kahiha) - without a father.
One morning the family awakes to find their electricity has been cut off,
presumably due to Ramona forgetting the pay the bill amid her depression.
Conveniently for the plot, the phone batteries have run dead too. This
leaves Ramona and her kids stranded in terror when a mysterious woman clad
in black (Okwui Okpokwasili) appears from nowhere perched on
a chair on the front lawn of their home in remote rural Georgia.
When Ramona tries to get the woman to leave she discovers the mystery
figure is privy to details of her life. Trying not to panic her kids,
Ramona conceals this detail from them and acts like the woman will
eventually leave if they just sit it out. But the woman has no plans to
leave; rather she appears to be slowly edging closer to the house.
Collet-Serra effectively mines dread from this simple setup. He cleverly
shoots his film in a way that makes the woman visible from every window,
as though she were the Eiffel tower in the tourist district of Paris. But
the initial ambiguity of who this strange woman is and what she might want
is dispensed with far too quickly. Rather than letting us bathe in the
unsettling uncertainty of the scenario, The Woman in the Yard is too keen to start laying out what the black-clad figure
represents, and it's yet another eye-rolling case of Hollywood horror's
current obsession with "trauma."
The second half of the movie suffers from first time screenwriter Sam Stefanak's clunky storytelling, resorting to flashbacks to explain something that
is already clear and obvious. There's a lack of faith in both Deadwyler's
ability to communicate her character's fraught psychological state and
Collet-Serra's capacity to get his ideas across visually. The director and
his leading lady are working on a level that is far above the second-rate
script. Deadwyler's nervy performance tells us all we need to know about
why the woman has appeared at this stage in Ramona's life, so we don't
need the movie to go into such detail over-explaining her
grief. Collet-Serra's direction here is some of the best of his
career, his blocking of Ramona and her children expertly portraying their
dwindling relationship. There's some clever use of Nosferatu-esque shadow-play as it's revealed the woman possesses the power to
attack with her silhouette. It's a shame that it all falls apart in a
final act that can't figure out how to do anything interesting with its
rote message of "grief's a bitch." As bad horror movies go, you won't see
many this well directed and acted.
The Woman in the Yard is on UK/ROI
VOD now.
