Blumhouse continues to be one of the most unpredictable studios in the horror game. For every Get Out or The Invisible Man, there's a dud that slips through quality control—and sometimes multiple. With The Woman in the Yard, their latest haunted release from director Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows, Orphan), we get a film that doesn’t so much defy expectations as it quietly shuffles past them in a funereal black veil.
Danielle Deadwyler (Till, I Saw the TV Glow) stars as Ramona, a grieving widow whose rural farmhouse becomes ground zero for a slow-burn nightmare. The titular woman, described in an eerie nursery-rhyme-style teaser—“Draped in black from head to toe, how she got there, you’ll never know”—appears with a chilling stillness and little explanation. That’s the central gimmick, and depending on your tolerance for undercooked lore and glacial pacing, it either works or wears out its welcome by the halfway mark.
Blumhouse, to its credit, knows how to market a ghost story. The packaging for The Woman in the Yard touts connections to M3GAN and Speak No Evil, two films that couldn’t be more tonally or structurally different. And yet, there's an effort here to present the film as a meditative horror piece with a psychological bend. The PG-13 rating may keep the more grotesque scares at bay, but Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography provides atmosphere in spades, even if the script from Sam Stefanak doesn’t always give it much substance to work with.
That said, Deadwyler is always compelling, and she does a lot of heavy lifting with minimal dialogue and a cast of mostly young or underutilized supporting actors. Russell Hornsby and Okwui Okpokwasili offer moments of gravity, but they’re not given nearly enough to do. It’s a shame, because there’s a kernel of something more potent buried here—a film about grief, about inherited fear, about the shadows that remain after loss. But the ghost story never commits to anything deeper than surface-level chills.
The Blu-ray release arrived May 27 and includes two main bonus features: Making The Woman in the Yard and Beneath the Veil, which offer a behind-the-scenes look at the creature’s design and the film’s thematic intentions. These extras are slight but appreciated, providing context that the film itself fails to fully articulate.
The Blu-ray presents the film in 2.39:1 widescreen with Dolby TrueHD 7.1 sound. Pogorzelski’s use of natural light and shadow plays well in HD, though the film’s overall washed-out aesthetic doesn’t pop. Audio is crisp, especially during the film’s sparse but effective sound design cues.
The Woman in the Yard isn’t the worst Blumhouse film by a long shot—certainly not worse than that AI movie from last year—but it’s a missed opportunity for something more memorable. If you're a completionist or a fan of atmospheric horror that doesn’t demand too much from its narrative, this may scratch the itch. For others, it might feel like staring at a shadow that never quite moves.
Jessie Hobson