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. 

The Shallows (US 2016: Dir Jaume Collet-Serra)

I'm not ashamed to mention that I've enjoyed all of Jaume Collet-Serra's movies, from the gloopy fun of House of Wax (2005) via the audacious but extremely watchable Orphan (2009) to the pensioner action antics of Liam Neeson in Non Stop (2014) and Run All Night (2015). So yep, I'm a fan. His latest stripped down essay in tension featuring one woman and a shark is a thoroughly diverting not quite hour and a half, slicker than it has the right to be, and quite the thrill ride when it gets going.

Medical student Nancy visits an out-of-the-way beach which holds sentimental value for her as one of her late mother's favourite places. Brought up surfing on the lakes of Texas (!) our heroine soon proves that she's more than a match for the massive ocean waves, impressing fellow surfers who warn her about the sharp corals - so we know they'll come into the equation later on. What they don't tip her off about, largely because they're unaware of its existence (rather odd for seasoned water jockeys), is the presence of a great white shark, in whose feeding ground Nancy is blithely surfing. Trapped on a rock after the shark bites her leg and with only a plucky seagull for company, she must work out a way to get back to the beach before her attacker closes in for the kill.

Blake Lively - going through it for our entertainment

The Shallows delights in putting its heroine through the wringer for most of the film's running time, with a full-on physical performance by Gossip Girl's Blake Lively (apart from the bits where her head is dodgily grafted onto the body of a real surfer via CGI), and in administering some nasty wounds (shark and coral) when it looks like she may just be winning her woman v. beast battle. That Lively has to survive dressed only in a bikini and sometime wet-suit is I suppose a given, although Collet-Serra is gentleman enough to minimise the lascivious body tracking shots you'd expect in a good old exploitation movie.

But how much is this an exploitation movie? The film's rather over-processed look makes the whole thing appear strangely comic book in execution - I think we're in PG-13 territory again. Sure it's tense, but it steers away from the reality of say Chris Kentis's Open Water (2003) or even Andrew Traucki's 2010 The Reef (filmed, like The Shallows, in Australia) to present a danger-lite version of the shark threat movie where even the obligatory self-surgery carried out by Nancy on her leg bite is diminished by virtue of the fact that as a trained nurse she knows what she's doing.

The shark itself is quite an impressive bit of CGI and Collet-Serra's decision to use it sparingly is decidedly in its favour (I surely don't need to mention another shark movie that didn't learn this lesson). It's a testament to Blake Lively's performance that about the only non human she physically gets to work with (ie that wasn't created in post production) is the seagull, appropriately named Steven, whose comic timing is, wait for it, impeccable.