‘The Woman in the Wall’ Offers a Gripping New Take on an Old Irish Tragedy

A woman wakes up in the middle of a country road in her nightgown, surrounded by green fields and a group of curious cows. She walks home in the freezing morning air, barefoot and bloody, only to enter her living room and find a painting of Jesus with a kitchen knife driven through one eye. (“That’s not good,” she mumbles to herself. “Sorry Jesus.”) Moments later, the woman is stunned and horrified to discover a dead body in her home. As a chronic sleepwalker she has no idea how it got there.

These are the striking opening scenes of new six-part Showtime/Paramount+ series, The Woman in the Wall. (The show originally aired in the U.K. last summer on BBC One.) The woman at the center of the chaos is Lorna Brady, played with a jagged rawness by The Affair’s Ruth Wilson. Lorna lives in a small (fictional) Irish town named Kilkinure, where she works as a seamstress. She also lives on the edge of dysfunction; she’s so overwhelmed by the emotional and mental fallout of former traumas that they violently erupt from her while she sleeps. Lorna’s anguish stems from being one of a handful of women in town who survived a local Magdalene laundry.

For those unfamiliar with Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, The Woman in the Wall offers a fast and deeply effective education. Some real-life history: Between 1922 and 1996, the Magdalene laundries, run by Catholic nuns, took in girls across Ireland who were considered somehow wayward. These young women and children were forced into unpaid work in grueling conditions, denied a formal education and deprived of many basic necessities. Some of these girls were single and pregnant, some were mentally ill, and others still were victims of sexual abuse. Babies born in the laundries were routinely taken from their mothers and adopted out without consent. It took until 2013 for an Irish prime minister to formally apologize to survivors.

In The Woman in the Wall, the women who survived torturous adolescences in those institutions are now living with the scars of lost childhoods, missing children and years of unsupported grief. Each is isolated and destabilized by their own pain, but none quite so visibly as Lorna. After a priest involved with the laundry, Father Percy Sheehan, is murdered in Dublin and his abandoned car shows up in Kilkinure, a detective arrives in town with a lot of questions for the women — and some laundry-related agonies of his own.

Detective Sergeant Colman Akande (played by Daryl McCormack with an imposing vulnerability) quickly begins to suspect that Lorna had something to do with Father Percy’s murder. Delightfully, the compelling cat and mouse game that ensues between them spirals into ever-more-unpredictable territory as the series progresses.

The Woman in the Wall is a twisty, occasionally harrowing series that starts with two whodunits, but ultimately presents a multitude of mysteries to be unraveled. As a crime thriller, it is captivatingly paced. As a personal drama, it is empathetically and realistically drawn. But the real power at the heart of The Woman in the Wall is its roots in real, heartrending events that Ireland continues to grapple with today.

The scale of the damage wrought by the Magdalene laundries is almost impossible to grasp in a theoretical sense. What The Woman in the Wall does so well is humanize the women and children caught up in that cruel system. It doesn’t matter that these are fictional characters — everything that happens to them in the series rings true. Compounding that realism is the sense of shame and silence that hangs over Kilkinure’s entire community throughout the show. The local Garda’s willfully bumbling behavior in the present reflects previous decades of neglect. So, so many turned a blind eye to evil, or worse, were complicit.

The Woman in the Wall is not the first project that has attempted to capture the enormity of the suffering caused by the Magdalene laundries. The 2002 movie The Magdalene Sisters was a solid attempt to shine a light on those hidden chapters of Irish history. In 2009, the documentary The Forgotten Maggies prompted a furor in Ireland and provided testimonies that likely inspired some of the details in this series.

Though it takes some creative liberties, the manner in which The Woman in the Wall unfolds speaks to just how complex and painful it has been to unravel and expose the depravity of what went on in the religious institutions at the center of this story. The series also, importantly, stands as a pertinent reminder of what happens when pregnant people are robbed of their own bodily autonomy. It’s not always an easy watch, but The Woman in the Wall is consistently impossible to look away from — a degree of attention Ireland’s real-life laundry survivors have long deserved.

‘The Woman in the Wall’ begins streaming on Showtime on Jan. 19. Paramount+ subscribers with a Showtime add-on can also view it starting Jan. 19.