‘The Woman in The Yard’ 4K UHD Digital (review)

Universal Studios

It has been 11 years since The Babadook was released, and what has followed in the decade since has been a significant increase in horror films that utilize supernatural elements to highlight deeper themes of various types of emotional trauma, albeit few have managed to have the same impact and heft as the 2014 classic.

In The Woman in the Yard, we meet Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler)  and her children Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and Annie (Estelle Kahiha) at a difficult time in their lives, where husband and father David (Russell Hornsby) has recently passed away and Ramona is recovering from injury.

Suddenly, the bereaved family find themselves besieged by an ominous woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) dressed in black who appears in the yard of their remote countryside home out of nowhere, and as concerns about the woman’s origin and purpose continue to go unanswered, tension in the family mounts and Ramona’s mental health deteriorates as the truth of their circumstances is slowly revealed.

While the premise is interesting and the film starts out with an enticing amount of tension and intrigue, it unfortunately steadily loses steam as its modest 88 minute runtime goes on.

This is not so much down to the acting, as Deadwyler delivers a compelling and competent performance as Ramona and Okpokwasili’s presence has a mesmerizingly mysterious air about it in spite of the majority of her screen time being spent sitting still in a chair.

Instead, the problem here is that the story feels stretched unnaturally thin, to the point of being increasingly disengaging as the film goes on, which leaves the impression that it would likely have worked better as a short film.

By insisting on stretching this idea to feature length, stronger writing and direction needed to be applied, and since it is not, the film suffers severely as a result and becomes a disappointing dull and needlessly drawn out endurance test where tension fizzles instead of increases.

As a result, while The Woman in the Yard is not the worst trauma-themed horror film ever made, as it at least seems to have some sincerity behind the concepts it is trying to convey, regrettably, it is not particularly memorable either, and while the outline was there and the cast was game, all it manages to achieve is to yet again cement why audiences have overwhelmingly lost interest in trauma as metaphorical horror, especially when it is done as meanderingly as it is here.

Not even the conclusion manages to be delivered with sufficient panache to make it worth sitting through the film, as the ending’s ambiguity leaves the outcome up for interpretation, and while ambiguity can be a powerful tool, in The Woman in the Yard, it unfortunately becomes a muddled crescendo to a tedious film that squanders the potential of its premise and the commitment of its players.

Extras include making-of, featurette, and trailer.

Verdict: 4 out of 10.