In an early scene from The Woman in the Yard, a mother walks in on her toddler reading Little Red Riding Hood to a treasured stuffed animal. “The wolf plays a game of dress-up,” she tells her inanimate penguin, omitting the fact that the Big Bad swallowed up Little Red’s grandmother first. When Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) questions her daughter’s subtle censorship, the timid Annie (Estella Kahiha) says that her companion “doesn’t like the scary parts.” The girl’s impulse is maternal beyond her years, and it’s a protective pose that Ramona will be forced to adopt at several crucial moments in the film that follows. But what does it really mean to protect your own? Does shielding your children from harmful knowledge leave them vulnerable to further harm? What is accomplished, and what is lost, by covering their eyes, by keeping them in the dark? The Woman in the Yard doesn’t pretend to have answers to these questions, but Jaume Collet-Serra’s latest probes such parental anxieties with a commendable combination of finesse and sensitivity.
The hired-gun behind such loopy pulp fictions as Orphan (2009), Non-Stop (2014), and last year’s Carry-On has built up a reputation for sly showmanship, with a style whose flourishes are appropriately fine-tuned to the screenplays at hand (recent likely-at-gunpoint collaborations with The Rock notwithstanding). The Woman in the Yard, written by Sam Stefanak, is decidedly more downbeat than Collet-Serra’s usual fare; it begins, like many lazy horror movies do, with the sudden loss of a loved one — in this case, the family’s patriarch, claimed by a car crash that also left Ramona’s leg in a cast. She wakes up to a house with no power, a teenage son with a chip on his shoulder, and a phone with no battery (she watched videos of her husband all night). Taylor (Peyton Jackson) has had to take over domestic duties in their depleted household while his mother recovers from her injuries, preparing them struggle-meals and feeding the dog whatever scraps he can find. The psychological textures of their home are not exactly groundbreaking, but they quickly lend themselves to cogent and considered emotional conflict when the family looks up from their breakfast of Dorito omelettes and out their front window.
For almost 45 minutes, the titular woman in the yard (Okwui Okpokwasili) — a gaunt figure shrouded by a long black veil — simply sits and stares at the isolated farmhouse, basking in the chaos her presence inspires in its residents. Who is she, where did she come from, and what does she want? No one has the answers — and don’t expect the movie to have them either. Ramona attempts to communicate with the stranger, and receives unnervingly cryptic, threatening responses: “today’s the day,” “I only come when I’m called,” “your children are ripe enough to eat,” etc. Like any parent would, she downplays her fear and tries to mollify the children with sweet treats, but Taylor is old enough to see through her act, and headstrong enough to think he can act on his absent father’s behalf. Collet-Serra directs these sequences of escalating strife with all of the formal flare and tension he can muster; the camera is almost always doing something interesting, and never in a way that underlines, or undercuts, the emotions that drift ominously through the frame.
The film’s sunlit aesthetic of roving widescreen tableaux, frames within frames, and canted angles is — quite literally — infiltrated by the woman’s shadow, which grows longer and longer with the setting sun before taking on a will of its own. Silhouetted hands dart and dance across walls and ceilings, knocking over lamps, swinging chandeliers, and slamming doors as Ramona and the children scramble to shut the curtains. They barricade themselves in the attic, but as the film shifts to dark and confined spaces, reality and delusion begin to merge. Ramona is on “crazy person pills,” according to Taylor — she’s prone to sudden bursts of anger, and she never quite matches up with her reflection in the mirror. Her spiritual proximity to the woman in the yard is implied from the get-go, but the film’s back half is committed to increasingly disorienting illustrations of their mysterious, and ill-fated, psychic link.
Collet-Serra’s skillset is usually married to clarity, coherence, and classical suspense, but The Woman in the Yard sees him exploring a surrealism that you’d think would be outside of his wheelhouse. The marriage between the director’s slickly expressive form and the film’s dissociative content is often bewildering, and occasionally falls completely flat. By the time it reaches its gorgeously and troublingly ambiguous final shot, however, any sense of diminishing returns is eclipsed by the sheer resourcefulness of this small and seemingly disposable movie, whose aesthetic and psychological canvas is constantly expanding in scope. The film is unafraid to capture the confusion, anguish, and frustration of parenthood, and its equal commitment to being confusing, anguished, and occasionally frustrating in its own right — all under the guise of a regular Blumhouse frightfest — is both refreshing and ravishing.
DIRECTOR: Jaume Collet-Serra; CAST: Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Russell Hornsby, Peyton Jackson; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: March 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 28 min.
Comments are closed.