If you’ve ever wondered what film school films are like, this is the movie for you.
Not in crew – the film is shot beautifully.
Not in cast – the actors give great performances.
It’s in theme and storytelling. See, in film school, everyone wants to make films about mental health. Which is fine, but no one wants to use the words associated with mental health, like “grief” or “depression”. And they also just don’t want to explicitly talk about it for some reason. So they think, “hey, I’ll make a genre movie about mental health!”
And it sucks. Because it’s neither drama nor genre and predictable as fuck. I laughed about the ending 5 minutes before it happened because I knew exactly what a freshman in film school would do, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened.
The first half of the film would have happened whether or not the Woman was there. She shows up and then there’s some dealings of grief. So it’s not genre.
The second half of the film becomes unnecessarily confusing, both because they never bothered to explain the rules or stakes around the Woman, and also because they tried to be cutesy and clever with making it relevant to the film we sat through previously. So the cool genre bits get lost in a sea of confusion (and there were cool powers the Woman had).
Like… take Midsommar – a movie about grief and depression. Our protagonist goes through a suicide event – one of the best opening scenes I’ve ever seen, by the way – and then gets, like, kidnapped by a cult. And in the process of trying to survive the cult, find out information about the cult, and turn the tables on the cult, the protagonist learns how to move on from her grief and trauma. In a great way too, I hate happy endings (in films).
If Woman In The Yard was Midsommar, what would happen is they would never explicitly show the suicide, but rather try to show it in cutesy and confusing ways through the film. They would find the cult, and then the cult would leave them alone while they deal with their traumas. Halfway through, the cult would remember they exist and do unexplained cult things. And people would die! But not really! And then our protagonist is the cult leader! But not really! And sometimes we see the unrelated suicide attempt. But not really!
If Woman In The Yard was Tucker And Dale, it would be advertised as the next coming of Jason but also Tucker and Dale would never try to save that college kid and would let the college kids be and eventually retaliate when the blood and guts gets to be too much.
If Woman In The Yard was Inception, the first half would be Leonardo DiCaprio talking about his dead wife to a therapist and the second half exactly as it is without any of the first half world building.
If Woman In The Yard was The Monkey, the first half would be the protagonist taking his son to a theme park and crying and the second half would be the batshit ending, but spread out over 40 minutes.
Look, mental health is a great subject to talk about. But for fuck’s sake, if you’re going to talk about it, talk about. And if you’re going to make a genre film, make a fucking genre film. Stop trying to pussyfoot around the issues you very clearly want to talk about!
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