"Decoding the Ending of Woman in the Yard — Unraveling Why the Major Secrets Remain Unconnected"

What if there was a woman in your yard, sitting pensively in an austere, lacy black mourning veil, just… waiting? It wouldn’t take very long for you to feel unnerved, whether she did something or not. This is the very basic setup of the (appropriately titled) The Woman in the Yard, the new Blumhouse horror film from Orphan and Carry-On director Jaume Collet-Serra.

Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler, from Carry-On and Station Eleven) has cause to be afraid: The woman in black appears after a car crash that killed Ramona’s husband and left her seriously injured. As she gazes at the unwanted visitor outside her rural farmhouse, she’s got no phone, no car, and no ability to walk her two kids to safety, with the nearest neighbor a few miles away. And on top of it all, the woman will only warn her, “Today’s the day.”

And yet Collet-Serra and writer Sam Stefanak (F Is for Family) don’t savor the promise of The Woman in the Yard’s premise. Instead, they point toward an ending like a pool player calling a pocket. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the movie can’t even sink its shot.

[Ed. note: This post, as the headline suggests, includes full spoilers for the ending of The Woman in the Yard. It also discusses suicidal ideation and depression in detail.]

By the midpoint of the film, Woman in the Yard openly declares what has already seemed more or less obvious: The titular woman is Ramona, or at least a personification of her suicidal ideation, haunting her and encroaching ever closer on all she holds dear. It’s not really clear whether there are rules around the entity’s powers, just that her appearance in Ramona’s yard is in service of getting Ramona to the final showdown, and the question of whether her darkest demons will win out.

It’s less a specific moment in the movie that points to this so clearly from the jump, and more the general tone. Like so much of modern, simplistic metaphor-driven horror, Woman in the Yard seeds a lot of winks and nudges that the lacy specter might be a walking allegory — the way Ramona is checking out of parenting duties, failing to keep basic food around the house for her kids or her dog, letting bills stack up and flowers wither. As with many of these movies, the air of tragedy feels more purely like Mental Health Allegory than like effective character work.

Collet-Serra and Stefanak are far too content to simply tell us this despondency is where Ramona is, rather than actually setting it up. After establishing all the ways her teenage son, Taylor (Peyton Jackson), is picking up the slack around the house, Stefanak’s script goes out of its way to say that Ramona isn’t just suffering a post-traumatic depressive spell: This is an ongoing state stretching back to before her husband died. We see in a flashback that they fought on the night of his death, with her telling him she was unhappy in the country. He counters that she was unhappy in the city too, and asks her what she wants. Driving them home, Ramona ultimately crashes the car when she sees The Woman (Okwui Okpokwasili) in her rearview mirror.

The persistent problem with The Woman in the Yard is how close it comes to the narrative neatness all of these metaphors-as-horror films want. Ramona’s first flash of The Woman could be read as a startling intrusive thought about death by suicide. Her ensuing despair comes out as bigger flashes of hot and cold rage, ones that put her kids, herself, and even the dog and chickens they own in danger, which is why The Woman kills the chickens and disappears the dog before focusing on Ramona. Every time Ramona gets stressed and irrationally flies off the handle, The Woman moves closer to the house, as if the strain and shame is literally imposing itself on her family.

But the filmmakers are so eager to play their big ideas for a big reveal that they muddle the entire sense of threat. The first act, with Ramona and her kids watching The Woman watch them, never feels as claustrophobic as it should. And so a lot of character acts just get introduced out of nowhere. Although Taylor seems resentful of how much he has to step up as a parental figure for Ramona — and how she never appreciates it — the way he angrily yells that she’s “on crazy-person pills” feels like it comes out of nowhere.

But the worst of the uneven plotting comes from the blurry lines between Ramona and The Woman. The problem is, Stefanak and Collet-Serra can’t quite make sense of whether The Woman is a monster or a metaphor — and for a film like this, the distinction does matter, even when filmmakers want to have fun withholding the reveal. This is a thinly sketched world, one where we’re told things about characters all of a sudden and asked to simply accept they are true, like Ramona’s husband saying she has been miserable in a life we never see and thus can’t contextualize. So however The Woman acts has to make sense — maybe even more sense than the family’s behavior.

Instead, it feels like she’s whatever the story requires of her to move forward. She’s a looming, nebulous, external threat, until suddenly she’s telling Taylor his mom’s secrets. The Woman can use her shadow to knock things over inside Ramona’s house, and once the family figures this out, they start drawing the curtains. But even when they totally block out her powers within the room they’re in, the family still goes and hides in the attic.

When The Woman ultimately gains access there, too, the movie somewhat implies that it’s because night has come, and darkness is just one giant shadow. That’s a narratively neat idea; depression certainly can seem more isolating and all-consuming in the cold dark after the sun has set. But it’s a rule change without a clear cause in the film, and the abruptness of the shift seems more in service of Stefanak angling toward his harsh ending than it does actually developing The Woman as an entity.

The attic sequence begets a mirror world that Ramona is briefly pulled into, and a bit where Ramona is momentarily possessed by the The Woman. Those sudden power shifts make everything around The Woman feel too jarring; she’s a menace weighed down by too many gimmicks. It seems Stefanak wants the ambiguity about what The Woman is and what she can do: The fact that The Woman threatens the children while also encouraging Ramona to end her life to protect them is yet another way the story could find some tidiness in the metaphor, a way to explore just how damn annoying depression can be, in spite of the movie’s flimsy internal logic.

But the thing about horror-as-metaphor movies is, they’re supposed to be movies first — built on functioning stories, clear characters, and comprehensible horror rules. Woman in the Yard, by contrast, just seems to be following a steady drumbeat of Do you get it?

Which is what makes the ending it’s marching toward so weak instead of bleak. The Woman assures Ramona that her kids will be safe if Ramona dies, showing pictures of the bright futures they’ll have so long as she isn’t with them. The Woman helps Ramona get a gun in place, speaks of how Ramona has called out for her for so long, and tells her (again) that today is finally the day. Ramona looks at herself in the mirror and sees The Woman’s ghostly spirit settle into her body. Then we get a brief glimpse of Ramona and her kids returning to a home with the power on and the dog returned, happily pronouncing they’ll know how to deal with The Woman should she return.

The final pan seems designed to introduce some open-endedness to this tale: Ramona’s signature on a painting she did has a backwards capital R, possibly indicating she’s actually in the mirror world The Woman brought her to. Is it possible she’s actually in the mirror world (and, it’s implied, dead by suicide)? Or is this just payoff for her daughter struggling to write R’s the right way, nodding to the ways mental health issues might travel through families?

It’s more likely the latter. (The sign outside their house is legible the correct way, as is the rest of Ramona’s signature.) But either way, the ending is a dud. Again, the most frustrating aspect of this movie is how close this feels to worthwhile symbolism. Woman in the Yard looks great, thanks to Collet-Serra’s direction, and Deadwyler is giving it her all. There’s something to the idea of the shape-shifting trump card that depression always seems to play, the way it both nestles into you and stands like a wraithlike boogeyman cutting you off from the world.

But The Woman in the Yard’s story is too choppy, with the filmmakers so insistent on presenting their elements as linear that their story ironically feels carelessly messy. Collet-Serra can have his fun following a shadowy lurking presence or flitting between realities, but he doesn’t mask how disjointed this fun feels. Does it matter whether the end of this movie is a coy sendoff or a dark one? Either way, it feels like it dodges Ramona’s actual decision, which happens off screen. The movie piles up pointless obfuscation, until suddenly that’s all there is. There’s no power in that story, and as a result, there’s barely any tragedy.

The Woman in the Yard is now playing in theaters.