The Woman in the Yard (2025) - A Thriller That Cuts Deep

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5 Stars)

Released 03-28-2025

Watched 04-19-2025

Reviewed 04-26-2025

Rented from Apple TV+

"Today's the day."

In The Woman in the Yard, director Jaume Collet-Serra trades jump scares for psychological intensity, delivering a haunting examination of mental illness through the lens of a supernatural thriller. Set on a remote farm and tightly focused on the unraveling of one woman’s mind, the film confronts depression, trauma, and suicidal ideation with rare emotional clarity and unflinching darkness.

Danielle Deadwyler stars as Ramona, a widowed and disabled mother of two who is physically present but emotionally absent in her children’s lives. After a car accident kills her husband David (Russell Hornsby), Ramona isolates herself and her children Taylor (Peyton Jackson) and Annie (Estella Kahiha) on their rural property. When a mysterious woman cloaked in black (Okwui Okpokwasili) begins to appear in the yard, ominously repeating, “Today’s the day,” the lines between external threat and internal torment blur.

The plot slowly reveals that Ramona has misled her children about the crash. David didn’t cause it. She did, after an argument about her despair and discontent with her life. That revelation reframes everything. The Woman, we learn, is no ghost but a physical manifestation of Ramona’s wish to end her life, summoned not by a curse but by a prayer for escape disguised as a plea for strength. It’s a devastating turn, as the Woman manipulates Ramona toward self-destruction in the name of twisted salvation.

Deadwyler’s performance is searing. She embodies Ramona’s exhaustion, guilt, and emotional detachment without slipping into melodrama. Her breakdown is portrayed with subtlety and pain, while Okpokwasili’s unnerving calm as the Woman is equally hypnotic. Together, their scenes play like an intimate, slow-moving dance between despair and surrender.

Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski paints the farmhouse in muted, decaying tones that echo Ramona’s interior landscape. Lorne Balfe’s unsettling score weaves dread into every shadow. At 87 minutes, the film feels as lean as it is heavy. It is deliberate in its pacing, sometimes to a fault, but never meandering.

The Woman in the Yard is not a film for the faint of heart. Its exploration of themes such as mental illness, depression, and self-harm is unflinching and may be triggering for some audiences. Yet, for those prepared to confront its dark subject matter, the film offers a poignant meditation on the human psyche’s fragility. It provides no easy answers, no tidy resolution, only the hard-earned acknowledgment that survival is sometimes the braver path.

This is horror not meant to entertain but to illuminate, and it succeeds. Four stars.