The Woman in the Yard

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CONTENT WARNING: This review contains frank talk of suicide, as well as full spoilers for the film.

It's a beautiful, balmy summer day on your Georgia farm. The power is out, your phone is dead, your husband is dead, your kids are bugging you, your shattered leg is acting up, the dog just puked, and now there's some woman in your goddamn yard. So begins The Woman in the Yard, a spooky, excellent slow-build horror movie, and I can't say enough good things about it. It's shot beautifully, the acting from its five-person cast is fantastic, and the themes it tackles are explored in a way that is both frank and honest, while still being visually and symbolically beautiful. About a third of the way in, you might think you have it figured out; that the Woman represents widow mother Ramona's guilt or past trauma, which she has to face and overcome to get closure and move on; and while it is that on a basic level, this movie has more going for it than that. It has more to say, more it wants you to consider. The Woman in the Yard is a breath of fresh air in many ways, breathing some life into what could easily have been yet another example of a tired horror trope. For starters, almost the entirety of the movie takes place in full daylight, with the Woman's dark, foreboding presence contrasting chillingly with the warm light of a heavy Georgia summer. The beautiful green, yellow, and brown colors of the countryside, interrupted by this stark figure in her black mourning dress and veil, is haunting. She is an unwelcome, silent intruder creeping inexorably towards the family trapped in their farmhouse, and closer to you.

As the son of a single mother myself, it's hard to overstate, or really articulate, how much I love Danielle Deadwyler's performance as Ramona. She really nails the moments of extreme stress that a single parent must feel, including an outburst about homework that was particularly uncomfortable because I had experienced moments like that in my own childhood, from my late father. Ramona feels extremely human: fallible, alone, unsure, and clearly terrified of what her own mental health is doing to her family. She tries so hard to not let her kids see how badly she's breaking, how much the Woman, inching ever closer to their home, scares her. But, as we see in many hints before the third act, she's already inside. In fact, she's been there forever; in Ramona's artwork, and her marriage to her husband. She's a person who doesn't know what she wants in life; getting married and having kids, and moving to the farm – those things made her happy at one point, but the Woman is always there, making Ramona second guess her choices to the point where she feels trapped, suffocated by the very things that once made her happy. She thought she wanted to have a farm with her beloved David, she thought she wanted to get away from the city, but once she's there, she still can't find joy in it and longs to escape again. But where else is there to escape to?

Every performance is worthwhile, though; the kids Tay and Annie, played by Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahiha respectively, are both doing a wonderful job. Tay has a realistic, not overblown, kind of defiant energy that is par for the course of a teenage boy trying to step up in the wake of his father's death; trying to fill his shoes without really knowing how to, or what his dad would have done in their situation. He wants to protect his family, especially given Ramona's injured leg, and gets understandably frustrated with his mother's well-meaning, yet desperate attempts to rein him in. She's grasping at straws, she needs to feel in control as much as he does, and so she holds him back from going for help with flimsy reasoning. Estella Kahiha is like, I dunno, eight? She has the least to do on the cast, but that also works for her character. She's a little kid; her dad died maybe a month ago. She reads stories to her stuffed penguin and changes "the scary parts" so that the Three Little Pigs make friends with the Big Bad Wolf; when you're that little, experiencing trauma and unequipped to handle it, sometimes all you can do is keep practicing your letters and shit. She still does a great job, and her character isn't written to be annoying or loud like lots of horror movie children who just end up screaming all the time. It's also really nice to see flashbacks of Ramona and her late husband David having a very sweet, romantic morning in bed together, and how David was clearly trying to work with Ramona's depression and help her make positive changes. You get a real sense of love from both of them, and a gentle, positive male portrayal from David. It would have been really easy to portray him as an abusive or difficult husband, to give Ramona a concrete reason for divorce or for her wanting to "escape" – but real life isn't always like that. Sometimes it's nobody's fault, or it's so nebulous it's hard to put a finger on it. Before Ramona's mental health issues took over, before the car crash that killed David, it really feels like he was putting in the work to try and make her happy. He wasn't perfect, and she isn't either, but it was just a very nice, formerly positive and warm kind of love that black couples aren't usually allowed to show in mainstream media for some reason, and it's extremely refreshing.

Now, it's kind of impossible to talk in depth about this movie without talking about what the Woman represents, who she is. Okwui Okpokwasili is stunningly eerie as the Woman, but strangely, I feel like the character is more about what she represents, rather than the performance. She is not The Main Character's Guilt or Trauma come back to haunt her. No, she is a force even more insidious and dangerous, even more deadly: she is depression. The word has lost a lot of weight, I feel, because it gets thrown around so commonly and casually; and that isn't a big issue, it's just vocabulary – but the Woman is such an unflinching, honest portrayal of what a truly deep, sinking, oppressive depression feels like, I'm very impressed. And, I won't sugarcoat it, my being impressed comes from understanding and experiencing her kind of depression; The kind of depression that can come upon you even on a beautiful summer's day, surrounded by your family. She is patient, and persistent, at times comforting and beautiful, but her only goal is your end. She is Mater Suspiriorum.

Credit really must be given to the lighting work and special effects that make the Woman so haunting. There's such a temptation for modern, mainstream horror (especially from Blumhouse) to be loud and chaotic, violent, with shit just happening constantly. In contrast, the Woman is quiet, slow, patient. There are still some played-out music stings when she appears, but it's still more reserved than a lot of current horror fare. I was particularly impressed by a scene where she has the family cornered, and one by one she seems to capture or assimilate each of them into her own mirror world. There's no flashy transition into this other world, no bloodcurdling scream to mark the point where she takes Annie or Tay. In fact, the transition is so gradual and understated that you don't actually realize she succeeded until it's already happened; because, truly, who's to say you would even notice if you did get pulled into another dimension? The subtle shift is much more jarring because it forces You the Audience to think about what just happened, not to be spoonfed it through some line like "Did we just get TAKEN to HER WORLD??!", which feels sadly like a rarity in today's filmmaking climate.

It is, unfortunately, not perfect in its execution. There are a couple of moments that almost feel like mandates from Blumhouse, just a couple of things that stick out as not feeling totally in line with the rest of the script up until that point; particularly, the sequence when the Woman finally does get into the house feels pointlessly bombastic, with her throwing boxes and flipping picture frames and breaking shit. In a way, it could be read as Ramona having a breakdown and trashing the room in a fit of rage, but it just doesn't fit with the Woman's M.O. It sort of feels like a producer said "Hey, the teenagers are falling asleep, make some loud noises!" The second is the ending. Ramona's struggle with the Woman culminates in the two of them in the garage, fighting over David's rifle. She's sent her children away to the neighbors' farm, having finally made up her mind about truly escaping the life she feels so trapped in. It's Ramona physically vying with her own depression in a final, desperate attempt to not give in to the Woman's siren song, the gun shaking in both of their trembling hands as they wrestle for control. I was telling the movie, out loud, "Don't flinch." Don't chicken out, don't back away at the last second. Ramona committing suicide is clearly the ending they want, and to back out, to have her suddenly, handily win over the Woman, would be a cop out. And, to their credit, they did not chicken out, but they sort of have their cake and eat it too. Ramona does kill herself, though We the Audience never see or hear it. There's no gunshot, no muzzle flash, not even a shot of her body. Then, Ramona opens the door of the garage to find her children coming back to her; she pulls them into her arms, and they go back into their happy, finished farmhouse; the lights are suddenly working again, Charlie the dead dog is alive, and there's a completed, beautiful painting in Ramona's studio, which the camera pushes in on to reveal Ramona's signature, backwards. This is the mirror world; it's a final hallucination, a happy vision caused by the chemicals flooding her brain in the millisecond of her death. On the one hand, I appreciate that Ramona's suicide is handled with the same subtlety as the dimensional transition I mentioned earlier; since the movie is fully told from Ramona's perspective, her experience of death is also from her perspective. If you shoot yourself (and succeed), you probably don't experience the blast, the heat, the impact. It's probably so quick you don't even know it happened. I think that's a really artistic, dare I say beautiful way to handle the situation, but going from that struggle over the gun, to the kids coming back and Ramona emerging from the garage, is just a little too quick and the dialogue a little too hokey. I know that it's supposed to feel unreal in the moment, because it isn't real, but if I had edited it I would have let that moment linger just a little longer, that silence after her unseen death.

Overall, I really enjoyed The Woman in the Yard. It's definitely in the overplayed "The Monster is Guilt" subgenre, but I think the visuals, the editing, the stellar performances, and the symbolism of the Woman are all deeper than your standard Returning Trauma story, and I really appreciate that the movie followed through on its themes and portrayed a mother actually killing herself. It's bleak, yes, but I think it's refreshingly fearless. We're so squeamish about death and depression and suicide as a society, we like to pretend that if we don't think about it, it's not real... but that isn't reality. Depression can come for anyone, sink its hooks into them and drag them down, sometimes so slowly that the people around them don't notice. Parents, too, sometimes commit suicide. It's not something to shy away from; rather, it needs to be talked about more, and more frankly. We need to be less afraid of depression and suicide, as a society, so that we can bring it into the light and combat it. Maybe the lesson is that we should invite the Big Bad Wolf inside, offer it some food and clothes and understanding, rather than shutting it out. After all, ignoring the woman in the yard doesn't make her go away.

Originally published on January 13, 2026.