Metacritic reviews

It’s a shame the movie has such a goofy name, which throws a shroud over a powerful and unique cinematic experience.

On its terms, and especially with an ending I read as ambiguous, The Woman in the Yard is also unflinching enough to maybe count as daring, and maybe Sollet-Cerra’s most viscerally moving film. It’s also among his least playful, least comforting. Your anxieties can’t follow you around if you can barely make it out of bed.

Some genre fans will be disappointed by the film’s slow-burn style and the cryptic nature of Sam Stefanak’s screenplay, including its twist ending that’s open to interpretation. But for anyone more interested in cerebral horror and less in watching arteries gushing and entrails popping out, The Woman in the Yard offers considerable rewards.

The film is a slow-burning tale of very real traumas suffered by a woman far out of her element and forced to process a tragedy on top of it all.

It's well performed, and Collet-Serra knows his way around a beautifully timed scare, but what's most haunting is the sense that the same idea has been done better before.

While the film does subvert basic audience expectations, it doesn’t really do anything beyond that as it stumbles through a choppy and meandering narrative that not even an admittedly committed lead performance by Danielle Deadwyler can help save.

There’s little here to keep us up at night – or from forgetting all about it by tomorrow.

Deadwyler remains credibly frazzled, pushed towards monstrousness in ways that will be familiar to anyone who homeschooled during Covid, and the bundled figure closing in on her is genuine nightmare fuel. Yet the rest of this hotchpotch never matches it, and flails in trying to explain it away.

There’s not enough here to sustain even a slim sub-90 minute runtime, and Collet-Serra seems lost when tasked with a project that provides little opportunity for dynamic action sequences or wild plot twists.

The Woman in the Yard never musters the imagination to horrify or even jolt you. It’s a tale of one-note inner demons.