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,........

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