Jaume Collet-Serra Returns to Horror with a Shadowy, Unnerving The Woman in the Yard

So many of Jaume Collet-Serra’s thrillers are about the portability of domestic strife – the way that unresolved issues can follow you into the world, turning lumbering vehicles like commuter trains or jetplanes or seemingly open environments like airports or oceans into tightly confined spaces. So it follows that when he’s working more directly in horror, rather than the more Hitchcockian mode of Non-Stop or Carry-On, he doesn’t feel the need to also displace them. He lets his characters work out their issues (or not) within their actual homes, where he can focus on really cranking up the gothic atmosphere. In The Woman in the Yard, his first flat-out horror movie since Orphan, almost all of the action takes place in and around an old farmhouse, in the process of fulfilling its fixer-upper destiny when Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) loses her husband David (Russell Hornsby) in a car accident that leaves her a metaphorical and near-literal open wound (she was in the car, too, and at one point we’re left to wonder if her stitches are actually helping her heal).

Ramona’s teenage son Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and young daughter Annie (Estella Kahiha) are obviously grieving, too, but their mom looks particularly worse for wear. So when she wakes up to a power outage, a cell phone with a dead battery, and a darkly shrouded woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) sitting on the edge of her property, she struggles with how to navigate this problem. She goes out and speaks to the woman, but she refuses to give any direct answers, only informing her, in a sing-song-y voice, that “today’s the day.” Ramona seems puzzled. Isn’t this very much just another day where she attempts to put one bandaged foot in front of another and wobble her way through?

So yes, this is another horror movie about a grieving woman forced to confront something that lingers more directly in front of her (and her kids), a manifestation of … well, you’ll probably figure it out. The most impressive aspect of The Woman in the Yard is not its command of literary metaphor but how Collet-Serra stages the majority of the action in broad daylight, relying on a barrage of camera tricks, odd angles, and mirrored framings to create a haunted house out of a well-lit home and a ghostly figure that, for much of the movie anyway, stays seated on an old chair in the yard (albeit at menacingly decreasing distance from the window). So many recent films have used soft focus as a way to hide nondescript art direction or bad green-screening that it’s a jolt to see Collet-Serra actually employ it evocatively. Between images where only a small portion of the frame remains in focus and canted close-ups on various bits and pieces of domestic life (kitchen instruments, windowsills, curtains further obscuring the world outside), he manages to fragment Ramona’s house like broken glass – which itself enters the frame when he uses dreamlike micro-flashbacks to blend a few details of the car accident into Ramona’s fractured mental state.