‘The Woman In The Yard’ review: Danielle Deadwyler stars in Blumhouse horror

Dir: Jaume Collett-Serra. US. 2025. 88mins

An isolated farmhouse in rural Georgia becomes a battleground for a grieving mother and her two children in this familiar, intermittently effective horror. A raw central performance from Danielle Deadwyler brings some depth to this Blumhouse thriller, which otherwise maintains a creepy atmosphere but mostly trades in familiar psychological horror tropes and an abundance of jump scares. 

A raw central performance from Danielle Deadwyler brings some depth

The last Blumhouse offering was January’s Wolf Man, which has taken $34m worldwide to date. The Woman In The Yard is more likely to follow this trajectory than that of previous Blumhouse/Universal collaborations Five Nights At Freddy’s ($291m) or M3gan ($180m), both of which have sequels coming this summer. Still, directed with a confident hand by Jaume Collett-Serra (Orphan, The Shallows, Netflix thriller Carry-On), the film should appeal to genre audiences when it releases in the US, UK and other territories on March 28, despite lukewarm notices.

Artist Ramona (Deadwyler) is barely managing to cope following the car accident which killed her husband (Russell Hornsby) and left her with a serious leg injury. The shambling doer-upper farmhouse in which she now lives alone with her two children — the film shot in a deserted homestead in Bostwick, Georgia — is littered with the detritus of grief: piles of laundry cover the surfaces, the hall is full of dead sympathy flowers, the sink is full of dishes and the cupboards increasingly bare. Her children, teenager Tay (Peyton Jackson) and his six-year-old sister Annie (Estella Kahiha), are largely left to fend for themselves.

Ramona is clearly struggling, a fact not helped by her cumbersome leg brace and crutches, and Tay in particular resents the fact that his mother has seemingly checked out. Their strained relationship is well played by Deadwyler and Jackson, and this fractured family is already at breaking point by the time Tay notices the mysterious shrouded woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) seated in the front yard. “Today’s the day,” the woman intones when questioned by Ramona. “You called and I came.”

As the day goes on, and the woman gets increasingly closer to the house (although no-one ever sees her move), Ramona’s attempts to keep calm and carry on slowly disintegrate. On-the-nose craft elements underscore the character’s spiralling desperation, including Lorne Balfe’s evocative if unsurprising score, which deploys mournful whispering echoes and heightened strings like breaking glass. And you certainly don’t need the the myriad dramatic signposts —  Annie’s reading of Three Little Pigs, a flashback to a movie theatre showing The Mirror Has Two Faces — to see where this is headed. 

Indeed, when the veiled woman really starts to make her presence felt, the repressed trauma of pain, guilt and grief casts its dark shadow over the family — quite literally — and Romana finds herself facing a deeply personal reckoning. (By this point, comparisons with The Babadook, the reigning high watermark for this particular subgenere of horror, are unavoidable.)

Through it all, accomplished cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski (Hereditary, Midsommer, Holland) does a sterling job of making this house feel marooned in a sea of long grass and open fields; there are no neighbours for miles, and certainly nobody is coming to help. (That the power is out and mobile phones are either broken or empty of charge is a grating contrivance.) And the screenplay, by Sam Stefanak, works well when it is given space to breathe. The film’s less bombastic moments are its most impactful, as it mines the insidious horror of parental abdication, both for an adult who feels unable —or even unwilling — to help herself, or anyone else, and for the children looking for a reassurance that never materialises.