Horror movies are now product, and most of them are so devoted to goosing the audience — jump scares, demons nestled within demons — that it’s actually rare to see a horror film of the week that’s a flat-out, old-school dud. But “The Woman in the Yard” comes pretty close. It’s like a haunted-house movie with no tricks up its sleeve.
It opens with the central character, Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler), laying in bed watching a phone video of her husband, David (Russell Hornsby), as he talks about the dream he had, where the farmhouse they’re living in and renovating was all finished. The reality is grimmer. David is nowhere to be seen, and as Ramona forces herself to get out of bed, looking depressed enough to join the damned, we see that she’s wearing a brace that runs the length of her broken leg. We put two and two together: that there was a car accident, and David is no more. (The wrecked car is sitting out in the yard, which is…strange.)
Downstairs, Ramona tries to summon the energy to be with her kids, the combative teenage Tay (Peyton Jackson) and the perky grade-schooler Annie (Estella Kahihi), and to eat the terrible breakfast of eggs and Doritos that Tay has prepared. But it’s a no go; she’s an emotional wreck, who doesn’t even have the will to phone the electric company when the power goes out. Depression might theoretically be a good subject for a horror film, yet a movie about depression shouldn’t be…depressed. But “The Woman in the Yard” has a stilted, desultory opening half hour in which everything is spelled out but there isn’t enough going on.
At last, the film’s title character makes her appearance. She’s a ghostly figure swathed in billowy black material, which covers even her head (she looks like a beekeeper in mourning), seated about 100 feet away from the house in an ornate cast-iron chair, with only her hands visible, calmly folded like the Mona Lisa’s. It’s a trivial hoot that both children, spotting this mysterious presence, refer to her as a “woman.” Because at that point how can they tell?
Ramona goes out to talk to her — and, indeed, the woman in the yard, played by the Nigerian-American artist, dancer, and actor Okwui Okpokwasili (who mimics the imperious glare of Grace Jones), talks back to her with a kind of sinister civility. She’s not some slasher-in-waiting. But she does seem to know everything about Ramona. She’s a ghost of fate who has come to bring Ramona to a deliverance. For a long time, though, she just sits there, not moving, which is also a bit of a hoot, since she seems to be nothing so much as an ominous icon of the movie’s inertia.
I’m not against a horror film that operates by suggestion rather than the literal blunt explicitness that governs too much mainstream horror. But “The Woman in the Yard” is actually as thin and obvious as all those movies. It’s just slower, with fewer tricks. At one point, after the woman in the yard has come into the house, there’s a paranormal scene of things crashing around in a room for about two minutes, and it’s so unlike anything else in the movie that you can practically hear the voice of the producer saying, “We need to ‘Poltergeist’ this up!”
The director, Jaume Collet-Serra (who made “Orphan,” which has become a piece of cult schlock), doesn’t raise your fear pulse by so much as two heartbeats, and Sam Stefanak’s script is just a minimalist gloss on “The Shining.” We’re stuck in that house, with nothing but a family of three digging through their cliché troubles. Danielle Deadwyler is, of course, a major actor, but here, playing a character trapped in her miserablism, there’s no variation to her performance. “The Woman in the Yard” never musters the imagination to horrify or even jolt you. It’s a tale of one-note inner demons.
