The Woman in the Yard (2025) Review & Ending Explained
- Rob Binns
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
“Your mama’s been lying to you. About everything.”
I was super excited for The Woman in the Yard (2025). I’ve always loved spectral, apparition-style female villains (The Black Bride of the Insidious franchise, for example, never fails to worm its way under my skin.) And that simple, yet effective imagery from marketing stills – of the unnamed, black shroud-clad woman of the title sitting patiently in the titular yard – had me champing at the bit for this one to hit our screens.
So I turned it on, and within 10 minutes I’d found my attention drifting; my eyes finding their way to the illuminated oblong next to me on the couch first once, then twice; then again and again. I paused the movie, made a cup of tea, went back to it, and got through another seven minutes before it hit me… The Woman in the Yard just isn’t a very good film.
Sure, there are upsides to placing style before substance – and at times, the film looks amazing – but the plot is paper-thin, the premise stretches credulity, and the main character is unwatchable. It manages to be both hokey and take itself too seriously at the same time: subverting expectations not in a fun, riveting sort of way but in one that smacks of no one making this thing ever really knowing quite what kind of tone they were going for.
Despite high expectations, The Woman in the Yard is, at best, a muddled mess; at worst, a snooze-inducing waste of time. The Woman in the Yard review below is spoiler-free, but – if you do want to dig a little deeper into how The Woman in the Yard ends, and unpack what passes for the film’s story in more detail – I’ll explain The Woman in the Yard’s ending below.
The Woman in the Yard Review
Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler) is a recently widowed woman living in a house in the countryside with her kids: teenager Tay (Peyton Jackson) and the younger Annie (Estella Kahiha). The film opens with one of Ramona’s memories, in which her late husband David (Russell Hornsby) talks wistfully about their life and future together against the backdrop of a sun-drenched bedroom. We learn he was recently killed in a car accident in which Ramona was also injured. We’re also inducted into the disrupted rhythms and routines of family life following David's death, and the financial hardship it’s brought with it. Collet-Serra’s camera lingers on the unpaid bills, the empty dog food packet; Doritos for breakfast.
It’s a small, tight setup, with three main characters, one dog, and – for the most part – the farmhouse serving as the film’s principal (and essentially only) location. The film’s early parts actually do well to paint the picture of a family in the grip of grief-stricken turmoil. Ramona has become angry and exasperated, snapping at the kids; Tay has become sullen and rebellious; little Annie and her toy penguin are caught in the crossfire. This is the setup when The Woman in the Yard’s woman in the yard (Okwui Okpokwasili) appears, sitting on the family’s lawn covered in a flowing, head-to-toe robe of a midnight-black gauzy material.
It’s a stark, sinister sight, and a thrillingly simple, original premise that leads to several interesting thought experiments.
Just what would you do if a faceless, unidentified – yet calm and unmoving – stranger appeared on your property? Drive away? Call the police? Turn on the lights? Open fire? Owing to their financial issues, the family can do neither of the first three – the car won’t start, everyone’s phones are dead, and there’s no charging them because the utility provider has shut off the power that day (of all times) – and Ramona’s unwilling to let Tay commandeer the family’s rifle to test out option 4. With that, the table is set.
When Ramona confronts the titular yard-dweller, the latter’s affect is a little smug and self-satisfied, and she’s hostile (or at least a bit rude) pretty much straight off the bat – deducing that Ramona’s husband is never coming home, and making thinly veiled remarks about the state of the family’s home. It’s also revealed the seated woman is, at least in some way, supernatural – silencing the warning barks of the family’s dog, Charlie, and lengthening its shadow, which manifests physically to affect objects inside the family’s home.
Collet-Serra serves up some cool shots – there’s a lovely, swooping tracking shot that moves in towards the house, and a bird’s eye view that captures the long pall the woman’s shadow casts across the grass – and the film does sport a slick, polished aesthetic. But, as I alluded to earlier, there’s just not enough grit, enough bite – there’s nothing to really grab hold of.
Sure, The Woman in the Yard was perhaps never going to be a film that seizes you by the throat and refuses to let go – the tack is more to build terror of the unsettling, quietly simmering brand – but even in that objective, it seems committed to its task only in a half-hearted way. That said, after spinning its wheels for 45 minutes, things do start to pick up at around the halfway mark.
Ramona begins to hallucinate, with the woman in the yard’s presence beginning, seemingly, to blur the lines between reality and beyond. To tell you any more from here would be to venture into spoiler territory, but it’s fair to say the supernatural horrors Collet-Serra serves up as the film begins to show its hand never quite match up to the – more mundane, and all too real – horrors it depicts: of a home grappling with the loss of one of its own. And, perversely, the actual horror action (presumably, what we all came for) almost serves to cheapen the other story operating in parallel: the family drama that unfolds before any shroud-clad woman turns up.
It’s hard to explain – I guess I just felt kind of detached from the action throughout the whole thing. It didn’t help that Ramona’s character – despite everything she’s gone through – wasn’t likeable, or massively relatable. It didn’t help that a string of banal dream sequences disrupted the film’s action and flow. And it didn’t help that, despite the inherent menace Okpokwasili’s performance brings to the table, the woman in the yard just isn’t quite as scary when her veil comes off. The action, ultimately, winds up feeling formulaic, the twists nonsensical. While the plot – which plays fast and loose with a hell of a lot of its own rules – feels flimsier than the gauzy headpiece of The Woman in the Yard’s eponymous antagonist.
Stream it, skip it – just don’t go in with high expectations. Because, while that haunting vision of that funereal apparition in the garden held so much promise, The Woman in the Yard proves that sometimes, the power of images works best when they’re allowed to sear themselves into our brain; to incite imagination and spark our own stories.
Many times, the stories we tell ourselves are far stronger, and far scarier, than the ones we have told for us. Yet here, explanation is more simple: that sometimes, the stories we're told – and I’d put The Woman in the Yard in this basket – just aren’t all that good.
Who is the Woman in the Yard?
The woman in the yard reveals herself to Ramona as the embodiment of the corners of Ramona’s mind: the scary, most deeply recessed regions of the darkest, most ugliest parts of her damaged psyche. It’s she, the woman in the yard reveals, who is the intangible internal entity Ramona’s been praying to for strength each morning. But that ‘strength’ isn’t the willpower to get up, climb out of bed, and take on the day. It’s the strength to do the unthinkable – to take her own life with the one remaining bullet Ramona has left in her rifle for just that purpose. That’s why the entity keeps repeating “today’s the day”, and seems to account for her presence in the first place – she’s come as a harbinger, a kind of psychopomp or guide arrived to lead a grieving Ramona, who can evidently take no more of this life after David’s death, into the one beyond.
What first stumped me was whether this entity was a product of Ramona’s grieving mind – which wouldn’t make sense, given the whole family saw it – or some sort of supernatural being that’s drawn to, and preys upon, the weakness induced by grief. After taking to Reddit, though, user FjordsSneaSnakes offers a third take: that the woman in the yard is a physical manifestation of Ramona’s grief and fear; a representation of the protagonists suicidal thoughts and feelings, but for all sensory intents and purposes 100% real.
That said, the woman in the yard appears to be more than just a manifestation of Ramona’s grief – but her guilt, too. Early on in the movie, the woman is shown with blood on her hands, which ties into the revelation that Ramona wasn’t just in the car, she was driving it; and, moreover, she intended to cause the car crash to free herself and her husband from a life she had become dissatisfied and disillusioned with. Having “blood on your hands” indicates culpability, and is hence the most obvious symbolism for Ramona’s guilt – we just don’t realise quite how wide the scope of that guilt might be until the film’s final scenes.
The Woman in the Yard: Ending Explained
While there’s multiple potential interpretations of The Woman in the Yard, the film leads us strongly down the path of the darkest one – namely, that Ramona succumbs to the spectral embodiment of her own grief and, tragically, takes her own life with the last bullet in the rifle. In the film's denouement, we see the woman pressuring Ramona – guiding the latter’s hand first to the gun, before bringing the ends of the barrels around to her chin. From this suicidal tableau, the camera cuts away to an exterior shot of the farmhouse and, as the audience, we’re all waiting for that shot to ring out.
But it doesn’t. Instead, the dawn breaks, and a new, happier sight emerges – one in which the kids have returned, the missing dog Charlie is back (bright-eyed and bushy-tailed), and the woman is gone. They’ve come through the other side – or so we’re so briefly led to think. So why should we consider this scenario simply a fakeout, and treat the real ending of The Woman in the Yard as the most pessimistic?
I believe it's the latter, and for a couple of reasons.
First, in Ramona’s recurring memory – the one in which David speaks longingly of the farm, and what they should call it – he asks Ramona what the name of those flowers she likes are. “Irises”, she responds. Well, in the final scene, there’s a sign we haven’t seen before outside the farmhouse – one reading “Iris Haven”. Second? As Collet-Serra’s camera tracks its way into the house, we see a canvas painting of Ramona and the woman’s faces together. But, more importantly, we see Ramona’s signature – spelt backwards. The backwards “R” as a motif is one introduced earlier in the film, when Annie is practising her handwriting. In The Woman in the Yard’s final moments, though, the backwards writing suggests that the world Ramona and family now inhabit is a kind of inverse of the real world. A make-believe one, even – a concept which doesn’t bode well for the idea that Ramona and her brood made it out unscathed. The idea that this final scene unfolds in a fairytale universe is further hammered home by the sign with the farm’s name – that previously only ever existed in memory – now having been manifested. Interestingly enough, the “Iris Haven” sign isn’t backwards, but why would it be? Like the rest of the vision, it’s make believe. It’s only when an element has a real counterpart (like the painting) that it renders backwards.
I’ve seen a few theories knocking around that The Woman in the Yard’s premise is a kind of The Others situation, in which Ramona – and family, and dog – have been dead the whole film in an act of murder-suicide, and everything we see is just a kind of purgatorial rinse and repeat Ramona faces as penance for committing it. However, I’m not sure I quite subscribe to this overtly morbid take. While there’s strong evidence that Ramona did do away with Charlie and the chickens – this is subtly foreshadowed both in dialogue earlier in the film, and the evidence is compelling – it’s less clear that Ramona murdered her kids.
However, we do see flashes – I described them as “hallucinations” earlier in this piece – of Ramona stabbing Annie with a kitchen knife and clubbing Tay with the fire poker. These could just be more offshoots of a troubled mind, or they could be flashes of an actual, lived reality – a past that took place and that Ramona’s being forced to relive.
The fact that, like Ramona, the kids can also see the woman is perhaps a grim portent – but I prefer to think they both survived the movie.
Gotta say, after doing a bit more research into The Woman in the Yard’s ending, I like it a bit more than I did upon first watch – when some of the more subtle inflections went over my head. But what did you think of the film, reader? Let me know in the comments, and be sure to check out my roundup of the top horror movies to look forward to in 2025.