Y’know, possibly the best place a ghost can be is in the front yard. It’s infinitely better than having one in the closet, in the basement, or *gulp* under the bed. But just because you have the safety of walls doesn’t make this hand-wavey horror particularly interesting. And, besides, she breaks the rules and comes in anyway. I think that’s cheating.

A mother who recently lost her husband in a car crash and her two children are in their farmhouse when a woman in black appears in the yard. Who is she? What does she want?

If that premise is absolutely scintillating to you, have at it hoss. But from minute one and through all the perplexing justifications for why they can’t just ignore her, call the cops, or go to a neighbor just didn’t interest me. In fact, all the excuses felt arbitrary. I wasn’t scared of the woman in the yard; mainly I was annoyed by the rules.

That said, the film has an excellent sense of place. The house feels, looks, and sounds concrete and isolated. Everyone except the screenwriter and director were working hard to make the place feel. And eventually things starts to coalesce and we get some visually interesting use of shadows… and while feeling pretty arbitrary (why shadows? I dunno) they are still nice visuals.

I was actually considering a higher rating as the movie went on, but when it ends with the screenwriter just giving up, I had to bring the number back down. What even was that ending? Did I miss important plot beats in my boredom? And why was the movie twenty minutes shorter than its advertised runtime?

Ugh… there’s a lot of good sensory work in service of a shrugworthy premise. I didn’t care why the woman was in the yard and all the attempts to resolve that reason weren’t interesting. And then it just stopped… not even sure I can say it ended. It stopped with the director’s credit and me sitting in the chair thinking, “Oh. Was that it? I guess I’ll leave now?”

Score: 68