Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler, I Saw the TV Glow) was recently left a disabled widow after a car crash killed her husband, David (Russell Hornsby, Netflix’s Lost in Space), and left her in her current, leg-brace wearing state.
Speaking of Ramona, she lives with her two children, Taylor (Peyton Jackson, Best Foot Forward) and Annie (Estella Kahiha, Fantasy Football) along with their dog, in a house in the middle of nowhere… and it’s said house that receives a strange visitor one day when the power goes out… a woman (Okwui Okpokwasili, Agatha All Along) covered head to toe in a black dress and veil sitting in a chair in the front yard… a woman that speaks of disturbing things when confronted by Ramona, which does wonders for her shattered nerves.
As the day progresses, the woman appears closer to the house, and with her advance comes dark thoughts and frayed relationships as well as hellacious hallucinations… but as the dark powers of the woman manifest more and more will the family survive long enough to learn the secrets behind the mysterious entity at their door…
Director Jaume Collet-Serra (2005’s House of Wax, Orphan) and screenwriter Sam Stefanak (Netflix’s F Is for Family) have conjured forth a terror tale for Blumhouse that is equal parts Twilight Zone and EC Comics-style ghoul-populated morality-play with The Woman in the Yard…
Throughout the course of the picture we get heavy psychological thriller vibes mixed in with mounting suspense and some solid supernatural shenanigans, all brought to life by a small, decidedly excellent, ensemble of thespians that elicit sympathy while showing us the effects of mental illness brought to terrifying, preternatural life.
The entire affair seems like a micro-budget indie fright flick through and through, rather than the Hollywood production the pedigree of the cast and crews involved reveals the flick to be, and that works to the terror tale’s effectiveness as the intimacy of the piece makes the family’s plight all the more hard hitting.
Speaking of “hard hitting”, Deadwyler is particularly excellent here, and sells the emotional/mental turmoil our heroine is enduring perfectly… and the film isn’t shy when it comes to exploring the more nihilistic side of Ramona’s state, so much so that it actually becomes more shocking at times than the ghoulish goings-on present.
As for special features present on this Universal Blu-ray, we get a duo of featurettes; one a “making of” piece, and the other a look at the eponymous “Woman”.
Filled with dark psychological underpinnings along with a slow burn creep factor, The Woman in the Yard is a solid supernatural shocker that is well worth a wicked whirl!
