Cinema Travelogue

Danielle Deadwyler as distressed mother is slowly becoming a genre of itself. Jaume Collet-Serra’s newest blumhouse horror The Woman in the Yard is definitely not the first horror movie about grief, and the Philippou brothers will ensure this will not be the last. Its psychelic montages are basically recycling the same few thematically related images over and over again that it eventually becomes diminishing returns. The premise is simple: Ramona, who has recently become a widow after her husband died in a car accident, carries the burden of taking care of her two kids and a farm house that was a dream project of her husband. The confluence of grief and overbearing pressure manifests in the physical form of a mysterious woman that appears in the yard and seems to move closer and closer as the day goes on.

Grief and suicide as fodder for horror material have proliferated significantly since the success of A24 elevated horror. However, I would argue there are enough elements within this movie that work and are genuinely more terrifying than any one of the tentpole horror movies from last year. Its uses of shadows are much more effective than the new Nosferatu because they’re considered in relation with the physical environment and setting (the location of the sun at a specific time during a day) instead of being completely manufactured. Most importantly, it actually has interesting variations and thoughts on the use of space instead of spamming systematic Kubrickian symmetry. The cut to the overhead wide shot during Ramona’s first confrontation with the woman, the way the camera floats and glides over the hands and bodies during a dream sequence, and one of the final shots in the movie being simulataneously the most unnerving and beautiful composition I’ve seen in a recent release. This is a movie with real lighting and set pieces. Although it could not escape the elevated horror trap – apparently no horror movie can anymore – it feels refreshingly less redundant than those.