The Woman in the Yard: A Frail, Barren Metaphor

I'm not the type to religiously adhere to my first impressions, but I vividly recall seeing the trailer for Blumhouse's The Woman in the Yard in the theater and immediately thinking to myself, there's no way this is going to be very good. And to put it articulately, I'm glad I waited to watch this movie at home. The Woman in the Yard is precisely what it sounds like - an almost spirit-like woman dressed all in black and sitting intimidatingly in a family's front yard - and it's so formulaically stereotypical that it's sincerely unprecedented. It's a movie that loses itself in a maze of themes, often forgetting that it actually needs to so much as accomplish something with the story it's trying to tell. It's as bare-bones as a bleached skeleton in the Mojave, and frankly, about as interesting as one, too.

Despite some exciting early signs of success, amongst them an initial sense of solemn tranquility speckled with some intriguing relationships, The Woman in the Yard quickly goes wayward. Maybe this is just me, but I'm growing weary of the trauma trope in horror movies, a tired motif I see as little more than a lazy cop-out, a shallow substitute for multi-layered characterization that's merely a cinematic band-aid being slapped on a wound too large for it to handle. This movie bases every last one of its pursuits on this tired cliche, limiting itself both narratively and thematically. Its story is a lot to write home about, and not in a good way - maybe the letter will be more interesting. This movie's momentum, or lack thereof, is often virtually nonexistent. It plants its premise of a strange woman in this family's yard like an immovable sapling, and then immediately proceeds not to water it, instead choosing to sacrifice its attention to family mundanities that will barely distract you from a paper-thin premise.

Not much of anything even happens at all in this movie's first half. Our protagonists don't attempt much of anything, and our black-clad antagonist obliges their inaction. The Woman in the Yard seems to me not unlike a wild west standoff where two gunfighters do nothing but look at each other for forty-five minutes straight. And when they finally do shoot, it's nothing more than a sad misfire. This movie's monster, killer, whatever you want to call the mysterious woman in black, is sadly underused. Her shadowy, psychic-like abilities are hardly brought to bear at all, and while I wouldn't be so heartless as to call her harmless, she exercises powers that could have made her unique far too sparingly to ever seem legitimately dangerous. A killer who never tries to kill is dull by nearly any standard, deeper meaning or no.

The Woman in the Yard is one big metaphor for grief that forgets it has to also be a movie. I can almost hear the cries of you didn't really get what this movie was trying to say right now. Maybe not, although I'm pretty sure I was paying enough attention to track with a narrative as simplistic as this one. This movie contains virtually no momentum at all, and clocking in at a mere one hour and twenty-eight minutes, it's also somehow too long. In addition, it's much too metaphorical for its own good. Its main killer if you will, a mysterious woman robed in black from head to toe, never seems to pose even close to as much danger as she should for being the only malevolent entity in this film - how can you blame her for not throwing enough shadowy punches or thrusting enough devilish knives when she's too busy juggling all those metaphors? The Woman in the Yard is a near-perfect example of why you should start writing with substance first instead of themes, rather than the other way around - an idea can ultimately only be as good as the movie it's a part of. And if The Woman in the Yard does in any way live up to what it talks about, let me tell you that it doesn't talk a lot.

The Woman in the Yard - 4/10

Colossians 2:6-8