vhe cows trot across a road in green, but here often grey-dark and wet Ireland. They wake up a woman in a white nightgown who is lying on the asphalt as if dead. When she wakes up, she discovers an injury on her hand – and then trudges off until she reaches her little house in the fictional town of Kilkinure: cursed sleepwalking.
Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson) is apparently not herself when she sleeps. She does things that she later regrets: rams a knife into a painting of Jesus, swings an ax at a statue of the Virgin Mary, and torches a car. And perhaps she also killed a woman on one of those nights and hid her in a cavity behind her wallpaper – a little like the murderer in Edgar Allen Poe's horror story “The Tell-Tale Heart” who stows his victim under a floorboard: “Nervous, terrible I was and still am nervous; but why should I be crazy?” And yet completely different.
The six-part psychological thriller “The Woman in the Wall” essentially tells of a true story: the so-called “Magdalene Laundries” in Ireland. Lorna is of course fictional, and so are the other women who appear in the course of the plot. “Inspired by real events” is a better way to say it.
Where are our children?
But the issue remains as horrific as it is real: Until the 1980s, “fallen” girls were sent to Catholic homes, where they were mistreated in the name of morality and had to do forced labor. If the girls were pregnant, the nuns gave their children up for adoption. When children died, they were secretly buried, like the 155 boys and girls who were found on the grounds of a congregation in Dublin in 1993.
Moviegoers were introduced to this far-reaching scandal in Peter Mullan's film The Merciless Sisters and Stephen Frears' Philomena. Others may remember the open letter that singer Sinéad O'Connor wrote in 2013 to nuns of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity in Dublin, who issued an apology in response to the inquiry at the time: As a teenager, committed for O'Connor had spent a year and a half with the sisters for truancy and shoplifting. Although she emphasized in the letter that she had personally been treated well, she found the order's apology completely inadequate and recalled the children who were taken away from young mothers in the homes. Women like a friend of hers at the time still don't know anything about their whereabouts.
The series is about such women. It takes place in 2015 and describes the mental life of Lorna Brady, who is in danger of losing her mind over the futile search for her child and perhaps – the perception can be so deceptive, the events are always explained by her confusion – has murdered. Other mothers also appear, organized in a self-help group that advocates for compensation payments. The series portrays her grief more realistically, without the exaggeration that characterizes Brady's portrayal. Only one of them may also be involved in a murder.
After the death of a priest (Stephen Brennan) in Dublin, a detective named Coleman Akande (Daryl McCormack from “Peaky Blinders”) comes to the town. In these scenes, the psychological thriller with horror elements becomes an almost classic Sunday evening crime thriller. And that's welcome because it's not easy to endure a devastated Lorna staring into space apathetically with disheveled hair and watery eyes for six hours.
Don't get me wrong: Ruth Wilson as Lorna is great. She already played a traumatized mother in “The Affair” and a psychopath in “Luther”. She also brings in a touch of dark humor. During outbursts of anger, Wilson develops a look as if she were a twin sister of the young Jack Nicholson. Nevertheless, without the scenes with the dapper city detective Akanda and his companion, the village sheriff Aidan Massey (Simon Delaney), “The Woman in the Wall” would drown in anger and sadness. The investigator's personal involvement in the story alone would have been dispensable.
In the end, a little music sensation: Sinéad O'Connor was working on a new album when she suddenly died in July 2023. But she had already made the “Magdalene Song” available to the producers of the series, as the tense, breathy soundtrack, which only sometimes booms with liberating bass, comes from the same David Holmes, who was also responsible for O'Connor's record as a producer and who sent it to her The script and the cast raved about it. The series doesn't need the song, it has enough energy itself. But he doesn't miss his impact: boy, boy!
The Woman in the Wall begins Saturday on Paramount Plus.
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