"The Woman in the Yard" (Guardian 28/03/25)

The Woman in the Yard **

Dir: Jaume Collet-Serra. With: Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Russell Hornsby, Peyton Jackson. 88 mins. Cert: 15

Sometimes a single image is enough to carry a film so far. This pared-down Blumhouse chiller opens with a brisk, detailed overview of the disarray a remote rural fixer-upper has fallen into after the death of a paterfamilias. No power, no food in the cupboards; a bereft, incapacitated mother (Danielle Deadwyler) leaving two children to fend for themselves; cracks in the plasterwork offering their own doleful commentary. The lingering spectre of absence is compounded one morning by an unignorable presence: a huddled figure in mourning garb (Okwui Okpokwasili) who appears on a chair in the backyard, and over a single day moves ever closer to the property. That’s the image – as unnerving for us as it is for the characters – and there’s your elevator pitch: Grandma’s Footsteps: The Movie.

Sam Stefanak’s script is at its strongest when leaning into the folkloric: that this house is unplugged from the wider world registers as both plot point and mission statement. Spanish genre specialist Jaume Collet-Serra precisely establishes where the woman sits in relation to the house, and Pawel Pogorzelski’s sunnier images approach an uncanny Andrew Wyeth beauty, although we’re mostly indoors, looking out; the woman proves less significant than the reactions she provokes. If the obvious reading is that this interloper represents unaddressed grief, Stefanak complicates matters by yanking at unravelling threads: the mother’s stitches and sanity, a dog’s chain. It’s not just the woman who’s shifting.

For an hour or so, that’s intriguing: we don’t know where we stand exactly, and there’s an awful lot in the air. It settles shruggingly, however, and some of what’s being juggled – Black Mirror-ish psychology, Us-like shadow selves – is revealed as decidedly secondhand. Collet-Serra paints over some of these third-act problems with style, but key elements go AWOL as we pass back-and-forth through the looking glass, not least basic legibility. Deadwyler remains credibly frazzled, pushed towards monstrousness in ways that will be familiar to anyone who homeschooled during Covid, and the bundled figure closing in on her is genuine nightmare fuel – yet the rest of this hotchpotch never matches it, and flails in trying to explain it away.

The Woman in the Yard opens in cinemas nationwide today.