I’ve seen a lot of good actresses roped into tepid horror movies to give them an air of legitimacy that rarely ever manages to come across. Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate, Halle Berry in Never Let Go, Brandy Norwood in The Front Room, Ariana DeBose in House of Spoils -and those are just from 2024. And the refrain often goes something along the lines of ‘the material does not rise to their talents, they are completely wasted by this movie’ -at best you could say the films are write-offs so the actresses can then do something they are more passionate about.
This was the circumstance I was ready for with The Woman in the Yard, a Blumhouse production from director Jaume Collet-Serra (who does not have a good track record recently) starring Danielle Deadwyler as the latest black woman being terrorized by some frightful supernatural force. A seeming paycheque gig for an actress in high demand elsewhere. Imagine my surprise to find that her character is actually modestly complex and at the heart of a movie that is more interesting than its generic trailer or title would lead you to believe, even as it caters to a lot of the usual hollow tropes and bare ambitions of Blumhouse. Sometimes though those shaky bones can be held together by focus and a star allowed to really act.
Deadwyler's Ramona is a woman in grief and severe guilt over the death of her husband in a recent car accident (in which she herself critically injured her leg), and has been emotionally distant for weeks now from her two children on their isolated farm that her husband had bought seemingly on a whim. One day they find a strange woman in a black veil sitting on a chair across the road from the house, and when Ramona approaches her discovers she is some supernatural entity subconsciously brought forth by Ramona and there to terrorize the family for her own transgression.
The concept is not a very scary one, and in fact seems very mundane even as the Woman, played by Okwui Okpokwasili, mysteriously gets closer to the house, makes the dog disappear, and appears to provoke frightening hallucinations in Ramona. It still feels like a dim justification for horror, the Woman's threat not very palpable. Yet it is the way that her powers manifest in Ramona's sense of reality and what it brings out of her that is genuinely disturbing. There are a few scenes that throw you for a loop in this regard: Ramona finding the dog's chain buried underground and attempting to pull it up, or a seemingly fatal turn from her hugging her daughter after a trivial blow-up. Where these moments should come off as cheap scares, they instead convey through Deadwyler's performance a sense of unsettling revelation.
Ramona is a character with secrets and dark corners, and Deadwyler plays superbly a sense of danger in her less controlled impulses. The vitriol she unleashes on her daughter for drawing the letter 'R' incorrectly is a touch scary in its own right, and she is as much perturbed by it as we are. The Woman in the Yard in particular represents a reckoning over an aspect of the tragedy that she would rather keep buried, connected as well to feelings of resentment and callousness around her family and their situation. And as the threat posed by the Woman becomes more intense, the greater is the trauma that Ramona has to confront.
I appreciate greatly that the Woman is not rendered a mere monster for the duration of the movie's runtime, that she isn't just an enigmatic figure behind a veil speaking cryptically. While her character is never fully defined, the visage is pulled back and Okpokwasili is given the chance to embody a moody power all her own. Going toe to toe with Deadwyler -matching her intensity with a chilling calm- and commanding her own scenes with expertly subdued menace, it is a stunning showcase. And her enigmatic gravitas is matched by the attitude of allusion towards her, through silhouette and camera tricks and yes, an occasional jump scare, that convey her presence as very encompassing and inescapable.
Yet in spite of this, it may be the temperate moments she has in the latter part of the movie, with Ramona or her kids, where she is the most frightening -as she shrouds any hostility, adopts a reasonable tone and engages in dim persuasion. The darkness of the Woman and her designs is implied to stem from the deep recesses of Ramona's own psychology, and this only becomes more apparent once she enters the house -perhaps a metaphor for her intrusion on Ramona's mental fortress- cornering her and her family until her will is broken and her secrets unleashed.
Collet-Serra essentially abandons his grounding by the time the story reaches this point, to carry out the conflict between Ramona and the Woman, or Ramona and herself in intense though ambiguous terms. Her world collapses on her essentially, and each vision she is thrown through is just a little more horrifying in both effect and implication before it arrives at the real truth of the matter of what the Woman is ultimately here for. And though forecast to some degree, it is remarkably grim a thing that Ramona is facing, that she has to triumph over -if she even can triumph over it at all. I feel obliged to dance around the topic here for fear of ruining the potency of its impact, but it doesn’t take much to see from fairly early on the Angel of Death symbolism to the Woman, and how that intersects with her role as an extension of Ramona too broaches some dark territory that the film is able to explore with both curiosity and sensitivity -it walks well a very fine line. The ending itself might skew off of it, but leaves enough of a window for interpretation that it doesn’t condemn the whole picture. And in fact it is one of those that demands to be puzzled over, though in a healthy way I think.
The Woman in the Yard falls a bit short of true greatness. The family dynamic isn’t very inspired and the kids ultimately don’t matter much in their own right. It also slogs a little bit in the early goings and loses consistency with its theme on a couple occasions for the sake of a scare or two. But it is effective, and the most interesting and honestly provocative film from Blumhouse in years. Deadwyler carries it well and Okpokwasili makes a searing impression. A movie that is much more than its bare pretense, worthy enough of their talents.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jordanbosch.bsky.social
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Comments
Post a Comment