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Thrillers often have their good guys and bad guys, but when there’s more grey area to explore, the better the stories in those shows are. And when that grey area is a fictionalized version of a real-life horror, that makes the story even better, as we see in a new Irish thriller.
THE WOMAN IN THE WALL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Over scenes of the Irish countryside, we hear a woman’s voice whispering the poem “Do Not Stand On My Grave And Weep.”
The Gist: “Kilkinure, Western Ireland, 2015.” Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson) wakes up on a rural road, surrounded by cows. She has no idea how she got there; there’s a shard of glass in her hand and blood on her nightgown. She’s been known to sleepwalk, so this unusual circumstance doesn’t seem to be much of a surprise to her; she takes out the glass shard, brushes herself off, and walks back into town. She goes to her house and sees she’s plunged a knife into a portrait of Jesus that she had on the wall, piercing a pipe in the process. She puts the portrait in a room she has locked and is reluctant to enter.
When she gets to work — she’s a seamstress in a dress shop — the shop owner gives her a note someone left. One of the customers, a pregnant woman named Nimah (Philippa Dunne) tells her that she’s gathering some victims of the local convent that served as one of the many Magdalene Laundries around Ireland to talk about getting restitution. Lorna, who was sent to that convent as a teenager when her parents found out she was pregnant, wants no part of the meeting.
Memories of being a “fallen woman” in that convent, and her baby being taken away from her, still haunt her. That trauma is likely ones of the big reasons why she sleepwalks. When she gets a look at the note, it says “I know what happened to your child” and has a phone number on it. She calls, but gets a text back. The person won’t identify themselves, but wants to meet at a local pub.
Meanwhile, in Dublin, DS Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack) is called in to a church residence where a priest’s body has been found, bludgeoned to death. The priest, Father Percy (Stephen Brennan), just happens to be the parish priest that helped Colman out when he was a kid getting in scrapes and other trouble, so the case is personal to him.
Colman goes to Kilkinure when the local officer, Sgt. Aidan Massey (Simon Delaney) reports that a car belonging to Father Percy was found by the side of a road there. As Colman interviews townspeople who might have known Percy, he finds out that the priest who helped him was in charge of a Magdalene laundry in the area. One of the women he talks to, Amy Kane (Hilda Fay), is near elated that the priest is dead.
Lorna goes to the pub to meet the anonymous contact, and gets drunk when the person doesn’t show. After going off on someone at a bachelorette party and then passing out, she wakes up in her house, with the doors locked from the inside. She walks into the locked room, which is wide open, and sees the body of a dead woman, and has no idea how the woman got there. Instead of calling police, though, she just leaves the dead woman in the room.
When she sees a tow truck carrying Father Percy’s green car to a police lockup, though, another sleepwalking incident is triggered, this one involving an ax, a can of gasoline and a lighter.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Woman In The Wall is a bit Memento-esque. There was also a film called Sleepwalker back in 2017.
Our Take: Created by Joe Murtagh, The Woman In The Wall paints a complex picture of its main character, Lorna, and the circumstances that have fuels her sleepwalking. While the show is set up as a thriller, the story is rooted in a very real scandal that haunted Ireland for decades. Because of that, the series is an effective look at just how people process major trauma of the nature Lorna suffered when she was a teenager.
If you know nothing about the Magdalene Laundries, it’s worth it to research them a bit, just to see just how badly the “fallen women” who were sent to them were abused. In Lorna’s case, she was one of the many young women who were sent to one of the laundries after an unexpected pregnancy, and whose babies were taken away from them. It’s an unimaginable trauma to suffer, and seeing the flashbacks of the young Lorna (Abby Fitz) being sent to the convent and having her baby taken are painful to watch.
But it also makes you sympathetic to her when she randomly wakes up places with no memory of how she got there, even if what she did while sleepwalking was set the priest’s car on fire. Wilson’s effective portrayal of Lorna is of a woman haunted; she’s can’t run from her past, even as she puts on a tough exterior and refuses to engage with people who want to help her out. The more she tries to push down her past, the stronger it comes back in the form of those sleepwalking incidents.
Colman’s side of this story isn’t quite as deeply explored in the first episode, but it’s still intriguing. He knew Father Percy as a savior of sorts, someone who gave him guidance and support in life when he desperately needed it. How he’s going to sort out this new information he’s finding out about the priest as he investigates Percy’s murder is going to likely bring up his old traumas.
Then there’s the matter of the body. It may seem almost inconceivable that Lorna wouldn’t go to the police right away when she finds the body in her house, but she also knows what she’s capable of when she’s sleeping, as does the rest of the town. Her choices may seem extreme, but given who the person turns out to be, the trauma Lorna’s suffered, and the extremes she goes to while sleepwalking, what she ultimately does with the woman’s body at the end of the episode makes sense.
Like we said, The Woman In The Wall sets up as a thriller, with Lorna and Colman on opposing sides of both the priest’s murder and the disappearance of the woman Lorna found in her house. But the grey areas explored in this story are numerous, and because that’s where the tension lies, it ends up being a lot more interesting than a standard thriller might be.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Lorna drags the woman’s body into her living room, where the wall is already partially open so she could fix the pipe she stabbed when she was asleep. She opens up the wall with an axe, stuffs the body between the studs, and then seals the wall back up.
Sleeper Star: Hilda Fay’s character Amy Kane seems to be especially angry about the attempts by the government to pay restitution to the victims of the laundries and says so in no uncertain terms.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Niamh tells the victims of the laundries that the last ones closed in 1996, she comments on how recent that was by saying, “The fucking ‘Macarena’ was in the charts.” Weirdly lighthearted line, given the circumstnces.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Woman In The Wall succeeds because of the lead performance by Ruth Wilson as well as the grey areas that the tragedy of the Magdalene Laundries caused.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
