The Woman In the Wall: Ruth Wilson’s Visceral Performance Grounds This Haunting Tale of Trauma

Showtime drama The Woman in the Wall is a ghost story, but not in the way you probably expect it to be. While the series features distinctly Gothic elements and a general spooky vibe—there are jump scares, inexplicable memory blackouts, and disembodied wails that sound an awful lot like the shrieks of a banshee—its true horrors are very real ones, grounded in all-too-human suffering and trauma. It is also a story of mourning. For lives lost, yes, but also for those unlived, for choices taken away from girls who might have made them differently, for the women (and mothers) they might have become if given the chance. 

On the surface, The Woman in the Wall is a crime thriller with a dash of murder mystery and conspiracy thrown on top. But the show is at its best when it’s reckoning with the very literal ghosts at its center, whose stories are ultimately much more frightening than any of its faux supernatural trappings. Grounded in a gripping central performance from star Ruth Wilson, this drama deftly navigates uncomfortable and often hard-to-watch truths and trusts its audience to come along for the ride.

Set in the Irish town of Kilkinure, the story follows Lorna Brady (Wilson), a woman who has been known to have dangerous episodes while sleepwalking. As the show opens, we see her awaken on a country road amidst a herd of cows, with no memory of how she got there or what she did along the way. It’s hardly the first vaguely unhinged incident Lorna is involved in—from hearing voices and hallucinating to putting a knife through the eye of a painting of Jesus—but they all indicate a woman who is holding on to her sanity by the thinnest of threads. These dangerous incidents, some of which turn violent, are the result of the years’ worth of emotional and mental trauma she experienced as one of the women who survived being sent to a local Magdalene laundry, where her baby, Agnes, was taken away from her at birth. 

Most American audiences are likely unfamiliar with the story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, Catholic-run facilities where so-called fallen women of various stripes were put to work as punishment for various sexual and domestic sins. While most served as mother and baby homes for those pregnant with illegitimate children, the laundries were also destinations for those accused of adultery, prostitution, same-sex attraction, or who possessed a physical or emotional dysfunction that was deemed unnatural in some way. The women there were forced to work in the laundries for which the institutions are named, they were also brutalized and abused, and many had their children taken from them. But barbaric as they were, the most horrifying thing about them is perhaps how recently this particular nightmare took place. The last Magdalene Laundry didn’t close until 1996, and it took until 2013 for the Irish Prime Minister to formally apologize to survivors. 

But Lorna is not the only character with a history that connects to these dark locations. Detective Sergeant Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack) is investigating the murder of a Dublin priest whose abandoned car has shown up in Kilkinure when he discovers that the case has more than a few connections to the town’s Magdalene survivors. Poor disturbed Lorna with her reputation for weird behavior is immediately suspected of being involved in the crime in some way, and things are made even more complicated when she discovers the body of a dead woman in her home with no idea of how she died (or whether she herself might have killed her). 

In its initial episodes, The Woman in the Wall can sometimes feel like two different shows fighting under a blanket: one, a standard murder mystery; the other, a harrowing story of emotional trauma and grief. The two threads co-exist uneasily with one another, and the story of Lorna’s struggle to trust her own mind is much more interesting than Colman’s investigation into the death of Father Percy and his initial assumptions of her complicity. But when the separate tracks of their stories finally connect, The Woman in the Wall becomes something much greater than the sum of its parts.