Jordan Peele’s triumphant “Us” makes the hairpin turn from family drama to supernatural nightmare when a young boy tells his parents, “There’s a family in our driveway.”
As the inciting incident for a slippery, psychology-driven horror movie, that word choice drips with danger. “Family.” Instantly, we know those aren’t any ordinary visitors coming to call on Peele’s film. They’re organized and bonded — willing to do anything to ensure their survival as a team. That line of dialogue, and even the title, “Us,” teases the very nature of the threat that made that movie and those villains work so well.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, “The Woman in the Yard” is instead a mediocre Blumhouse joint that tries the same strategy to no avail. That’s disappointing coming from the guy who gave us the twisted “Orphan,” but about what you’d expect from the dude who was also behind “Black Adam” and “The Commuter.” When widower Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) spots a mysterious figure on the front lawn of her rural Georgia home, her eldest son, Taylor (Peyton Jackson), states the obvious: “There’s a woman in the yard.”
Home invasion premises don’t get much more pedestrian than that and, even draped in a black shroud, the titular “woman” isn’t much scarier than your average tarot card reader. Still, she’s the main attraction and, fresh off “Agatha All Along,” the witchy Okwui Okpokwasili gives a magnetic performance that would work significantly better in a spooky fantasy or adventure film. The actress instead battles endless dead air in this sloppy metaphor for grief — a supernatural misfire that’s peppered with gross-out gags and jump-scares that are uncomfortable but rarely compelling.
Sam Stefanak’s confusing script doesn’t set The Woman or her victims up for success, sticking Ramona with a broken leg, a contrived reason she can’t call the police, and a tragic backstory about losing her husband (Russell Hornsby) to a car accident weeks before. The single location is presented like a claustrophobic torture chamber, but much of the movie looks and feels like any other family’s crappy afternoon. Protecting Taylor and her youngest, Annie (Estella Kahiha), from their unwelcome visitor, the immobile mom of two tries interrogating The Woman at first. There’s a nursing home nearby. Maybe she— “How did I get here?”
Said from behind a veil of moldy black velvet (a costuming choice that’s been done to death and still hasn’t worked once), The Woman’s first line is better than the one that heralds her arrival. It also holds the key to unlocking her true identity and the underlying evil this movie’s god-awful title tells us nothing about. Riddled with plot holes and bogged down in a slew of needless flashbacks, that solution neither makes sense nor entertains and, if nothing else, recommends skipping the theaters to go touch grass.
Commingling an overwrought spin on something like “The Babadook” with the kind of bland nonsense genre fans should expect from a Blumhouse flick in March, “The Woman in the Yard” is effectively a cinematic garage sale peddling parts from better movies. There’s a body horror beat ripped straight from “Black Swan” and, of course, a stuffed animal with a lot of personality because where would we be without one of those? Save for one cute joke about Doritos, this family isn’t smart, fun, or interesting — and neither is anything or anyone that happens to them.
Soaking his film in an atypical amount of sunlight, Collet-Serra forces the generally strong work of cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski into boring monotony. (It’s a funny change of pace that Blumhouse films these days are looking more corn-yellow than that characteristic shiny gray, but I digress.) Simultaneously, Deadwyler spins in circles trying to conjure up any reasonable motivation that explains Ramona locking the doors and… just sitting down (???) as her family’s main defense strategy.
Picked through by the right horror obsessives, “The Woman in the Yard” has one or two original hidden gems that will be worth viewing for certain crowds. When the sun finally sets, shadows take on a mind of their own and, spoiler alert, The Woman defies every expectation by leaving the yard. That’s something plenty of filmgoers will wish they had done by the time the credits roll on this remarkably weird use of public space — a banner new entry in the [NOUN IN A NOUN] subgenre no one needs.
Grade: C-
“The Woman in the Yard” is in theaters Friday, March 28.
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