The Woman in the Yard

People always overreact when they see goths in daylight
dir: Jaume Collet-Serra
2025
I wanted to like this. I wanted to watch a version of this kind of movie and enjoy it.
You can’t always get what you want, though, and regardless of the Rolling Stones song that’s been lying to us for so many decades, sometimes you don’t get what you need either.
This was never going to be it. Not with this director.
The central question of the movie, being who is the woman in the yard in the movie called The Woman In the Yard, is a question that is answered too many times to diminishing returns each time. It should not be like that. Who the woman in the yard is, should be irrelevant, if mainly she’s meant to inspire unease and evoke terror.
Is this an update of The Woman in Black, who just happens to be Black, terrorising a Black family? I wish I could say it was. That story has an explanation of what the people being terrorised are going through, as in the reason for it. It tells those people, obsessed with a ‘logical’ explanation for something happening that’s supernatural, and they fool themselves into thinking there’s a way out of their predicament. A rational solution to an irrational problem. They often do this in horror films.
The beauty of it is that better horror flicks only use it as another rug beneath the audience’s feet to pull out from under them when the time is right. Vengeful, enraged supernatural entities don’t always care about when you’ve dotted your Is and crossed your Ts; they want to torment people for a need for vengeance that cannot be sated. Beyond Death, beyond all reason, beyond our desperate need for rationality.
This isn’t one of the better horror flicks, so the ‘explanation’ ends up being, in the immortal words of an ancient Saturday Night Live sketch, a floor wax AND a dessert topping! And yet in writing that I feel a bit churlish, especially in terms of how seriously it seems to treat at least one part of the story.
Grief, in case you haven’t experienced it yet, and it’s unlikely that you haven’t, dear reader, is vast, as you know. Guilt is terrible, regret is awful, lots of feelings are harrowing, but grief is… so infinite does it seem that it can feel like flailing in an endless ocean with no floor and no land on the horizon.
It’s the thing with feathers and claws, yes, and plenty more clunky metaphors.