The Woman in the Yard (USA 2025: Dir Jaume Collet-Serra)

Spanish director Collet-Serra has dipped his toes into the 'Fantastic' genre several times before, including his debut feature, 2005's House of Wax and 2009's Orphan (I'm still not sure that shark movies - in this case his The Shallows from 2016 - count as 'Fantastic' movies). For his latest outing he's sticking a whole foot in.

Danielle Deadwyler is Ramona, a woman injured in a car crash which killed her husband David (Russell Hornsby). Now a single parent with two kids, adolescent Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and young Annie (Estella Kahiha), Ramona is struggling. As well as the bills piling up, the family live on a remote farm which David bought as a 'fixer upper' opportunity as is pretty much falling apart. The wrecked car in which David died stands outside the house covered in tarpaulin, for reasons that aren't immediately clear.

Tensions run high from the beginning, particularly between Taylor and his mum; a power outage means that not only is her son unable to play video games, but the single mobile phone in the house is out of charge, so there's no prospect of finding out when the electricity is coming back on.

Into this rather tense setup comes a strange and unwanted addition; as the title of the movie sets out abundantly clearly, there's a woman in the yard, dressed in black and sitting on a wrought iron chair facing away from the house. When questioned, Ramona is unable to get much sense out of her, but recoils at the sight of blood on the odd visitor's hands. Taylor, always keen to assume 'man of the house' status in his father's absence, suggests a more direct approach, particularly when it seems that the woman, still seated, is getting nearer the house.

With this rather M. Night Shyamalan setup in place, the spookiness starts; family tensions spill over, secrets are revealed and Ramona must face a difficult decision. It's at this point that most critics seem to have written the movie off as 'silly' and 'confusing'. I would agree with the last word, but grief and guilt make the world confusing for anyone who finds themselves in those states. It's definitely not 'silly' though; the closest comparison, in feel rather than detail, was Adrian Lyne's 1990 movie Jacob's Ladder.

The Woman in the Yard is by no means a perfect film - it veers from one mood to another alarmingly quickly - if the expected effect was to unseat the audience, then the director succeeded. I'm not sure if the whole thing wasn't just a little too oblique to be really satisfying (and the central 'woman in the yard' premise didn't really work for me), but I applauded the wonkiness of it and the refusal to play by accepted narrative rules.