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. 

Wilson’s performance is, from beginning to end, astonishing. Her Lorna is paranoid, lost, haunted, and furious by turns, a woman exhausted by a lifetime of trying to hold herself together and repeatedly falling apart. The unexpressed rage that manifests during her sleepwalking episodes is genuinely terrifying at times, and her frequent desperation to stay awake, because she fears what she’ll do if she doesn’t, is palpable. Lorna is not always an easy character to like; she’s rude, cruel, and desperately, painfully unhappy, for reasons that are very much not her fault, but her emotional journey makes for riveting television. This, more than any whodunnit, is what makes this show worth coming back to week after week. (And, to be fair, by the time you find out the identity of the murderer, you may not care all that much anymore.) 

McCormack is an excellent foil for Wilson, infusing Colman with a surprising vulnerability. As more details about the detective’s past come to light—he himself is an adoptee who was born in a Catholic mother and baby home—his growing obsession with the larger truth of the laundries, and what happened to the children who disappeared within the Kilkinure convent’s walls, transforms into something that feels an awful lot like righteous fury. 

As the show dives deep into the depth and breadth of the Church’s cruelty, it becomes increasingly confident in its voice and vision, laying out a seemingly unending list of horrors, conspiracy, and corruption that is nigh on impossible to look away from. Yes, there are areas where the show lacks nuance—every nun is essentially Satan in a wimple, for example—but the show smartly refuses to make Lorna, Colman, or any of its other characters martyrs to its larger symbolic cause. Shot through with a bracing undertone of black humor, the series never forgets that it is a story of imperfect, damaged people, who are all just doing their best even on their worst days. 

The Woman in the Wall isn’t particularly subtle about its themes or the larger messages it wants viewers to take away from it. (It’s unfortunate how timely these conversations about female bodily autonomy remain today, is all I’m saying.) Nor is it always a particularly easy watch. But whether you take it as a lesson, a cautionary tale, or something in between, at its core is a truth that deserves to be heard.

The Woman in the Wall premieres Friday, January 19th on Paramount+, and on-air on Sunday, January 21st on Showtime. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

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