Spooky Tresspaser

The Women In The Yard marks the return of director Jaume Collet-Serra to his horror roots after years in the big budget action space. He puts some scary images together and gives a good cast a chance to shine but is let down by a fairly weak script.

The film begins with struggling mum Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) watching a video of her deceased husband. Struggling may be a bit of an understatement, the crash that took her husband also left her with a badly broken leg and she is stuck in a pit of despair so deep it has rendered her almost non-existent as a parent. Her son Taylor has essentially taken over looking after his little sister Annie, the food is running out and when the electricity goes off they have no means of contacting anyone. With tensions already frayed, things take a sinister turn as a mysterious and threatening figure in black appears in the garden, creeping slowly closer as the day drags on.

The titular woman in the yard is played with equal grace and menace by an excellent Okwui Okpokwasili. Starting off speaking quietly and cryptically she is instantly striking and by the time she starts to make a serious move she seems ten foot tall, towering over those who confront her and ready to reach out and swallow the whole family in shadow. Some excellent camerawork and cinematography add to the atmosphere and her supernatural powers are visualised in a very effective and cool looking way. The film also taps in to the fear of isolation (what can you do when someone will malintent shows up and you are all on your own with no way of contacting the outside world?) and the fact that it almost all takes place on a sunny day rather than rely on the dark gives it its own feel. Danielle Deadwyler is as good as you would expect and both the younger actors (Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahiha) hold their own.

So the talent is there for a quality slice of "elevated" horror, but the story doesn't have half as much to say as it thinks it does and what it does say has been covered in better fright films. At one point this was a black list screenplay called "The Man In The Yard" but you can smell the studio re-writes plastered over debut screenwriter Sam Stefanak's work. So we have ended up with is yet another supernatural force as a metaphor for mental health struggles plot, and a messy one at that. Aside from the fact we are at the point where the hammering of this theme is starting to just get insulting to people with mental health problems (note to film makers : not everyone who is depressed destroys everything around them), we are stuck in one mode the entire film. Even in flashbacks we never see a glimpse of a better version of Romona or get a sense of the person she could be. This makes her annoying rather than sympathetic and having to watch a young child in such a situation is stressful rather than suspenseful. We also have a very disjointed third act that is trying so hard to make sure the audience knows what the "meaning" is, it gets lost in metaphor and mirror worlds. When they have the antagonist actually spell out what they represent you know the creators didn't have faith in the events standing on their own two feet.There is a sense The Women In The Yard would have been better if it had dialled back the rote subtext and focused on what it does well, delivering scares. As it is, repetition and lack of script finesse means it briefly unsettles but ultimately underwhelms.

5 "the days" out of 10 days.

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