September 7: The Woman in the Yard

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Watched The Woman in the Yard tonight. I didn’t come into this movie with high expectations, and that was correct, because it was not very good. I was kind of hoping it would pleasantly surprise me but essentially all the spookiness in it was the imagery of the titular woman. I got no more from the movie than from, like, the trailer.

I might not be entirely fair to this film, as I clocked out pretty early and maybe I didn’t give it enough chance to grow on me. But I mean, I was still watching. If it had gotten noticeably more interesting, it would have pulled me back in. Alternately, its early sins were insurmountable.

 

I thought pretty early on, and I don’t know I’ve changed my mind, that it really didn’t have enough juice for even a 90 minute full length feature. This was a short. The woman in the yard is the manifestation of the mother’s grief/anger is pretty clear from basically the very beginning. There isn’t a lot of twist there and any of the confusing, psychedelic what’s-real-and-what’s-not stuff later on really doesn’t change or even complicate that central premise.

The first ten minutes of the movie dragged so long I thought it was 20 minutes and wondered why such a short film was taking so long to get started. I found it extremely depressing in a fairly straightforward way, pretty much all the way through, but definitely in the first half, without letting up, and without simultaneously creating any sort of sympathy in me for the characters or their situation.

The scene in the attic was the most traditionally ‘scary’ part but it relied waaaaay too much on flashing lights, which I don’t have respect for. If I’m only scared because I can’t see what’s happening properly, it’s not scary. There were more subtle scares earlier but nothing to really write home about. That was obviously the Horror Climax and–meh.

I didn’t understand the ending particularly. This is partially on me because I had zoned so far out but like…the ambiguity of did she or did she not end her own life didn’t land for me, either. I was so depressed, and didn’t really think there was any realistic way she wouldn’t, and so… let down by a story that has that as its conclusion, that I kind of strayed away from it a little. But if she didn’t, that pivot to a happy ending (“happy”) was VERY stark. She just, uh, decided not to (okay, the penguin, etc.) and then her kids came home and the power came on and the dog’s alive and everyone is happy, no scary parts! The biggest clues to me, though, were that the farm had a name–something associated with David’s “dream,” with a beautiful unreality that they never came anywhere close to achieving–and that her painting has her name spelled backwards on it, which was previously a sign that she was in some sort of… unreal place. Of course it was also a scary unreal place, so why she’s now in a pleasant unreal place, I don’t really get. Something kind of unpleasant about the implications of that, also.

Anyway. I did like the detail that they were stuck in the house with no access to phones specifically because Ramona had been using all the battery on hers to look at old Fridged Husband videos. Ironic. Also I enjoyed the Woman herself; I thought that was a very creepy performance and general character design.

But overall, depressing, boring, cliche, and not particularly scary!