Another film that gives you a title that is all you need to know about it, The Woman In The Yard is all about, well, a woman in the yard. She's not up to anything. She doesn't help to cut the grass and tidy up the area. She doesn't set up a stall and start some unexpected yard sale. She just sits there, covered by a dark shroud, and causing some upset for Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) and her two children (played by Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahiha). And they were already upset by the kicks and punches delivered upon them by life.
It's been a few years now since Jaume Collet-Serra helmed a film that was properly good (although I am very much aware that most people liked Jungle Cruise a lot less than I did), he seems to do one every five years or so that allows him to retain the goodwill of most film fans, and this isn't one of his better features. He's not helped by a screenplay from Sam Stefanak that makes it painfully obvious that this is his feature debut. The required atmosphere isn't established well enough, nor is it maintained throughout the runtime, and the third act is the kind of "oh look, aren't we being clever?" nonsense that will have most viewers rolling their eyes. There's a good idea for a short film here, but it's overstretched to 88 minutes.
Despite not being given great material to work with, Deadwyler does well enough in the lead role. She's given decent support from Jackson and Kahiha, as well as Russell Hornsby (playing David, who appears in a number of flashbacks), and Okwui Okpokwasili is allowed to sit there and emanate menace as the titular woman. It's a real shame that all of these performances are mired in a film so undeserving of them, despite the assumed best intentions of all involved.
This wants to use the horror movie trappings to explore grief and mental health, in a way that has been managed so successfully by other titles I could point you toward right now, but it forgets to deliver enough substance. We don't really get to know the characters before the woman in the yard appears, there's a disappointing lack of full-blooded horror to make up for what it lacks elsewhere, and the third act shows a real lack of confidence and clarity as the film-makers try to tie everything up neatly before the end credits roll.
I wanted this to be much better, particularly for Deadwyler. Every unfolding minute just made me feel worse and worse though, knowing that I was wasting my time with something that was competently made, from a technical standpoint, but ultimately weak. It also doesn't feel like it makes the point that it really wants to make, certainly not with any weight behind it anyway. A lot of the individual elements are far from terrible, but everything is put together to create a finished product that feels amateurish and completely mishandled.
4/10
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