‘The Woman in the Wall’ builds into riveting drama
All six episodes of “The Woman in the Wall,” on Showtime and Paramount+, have been released, so you’re able to binge it. And you might want to binge it, since it’s a powerful story. Ruth Wilson stars as an Irish woman who was sent as a pregnant teen to one of the abusive Magdalene Laundries, where her newborn was taken from her arms and, presumably, given up for adoption.
The first two episodes are the weakest, as they strain to bring us inside the head and heart of Wilson’s tortured Lorna, who remains devastated despite all the years that have passed. An extreme insomniac, she has a slippery grasp on reality, so when she finds a dead woman in her house, she spirals into hysteria. Her emotions only become more intense when she receives a note from an unnamed person claiming to know what happened to her baby.
The artsy sequences that try to re-create Lorna’s chaotic point of view are unfortunate. They are overkill and only serve to confuse. But the narrative strengthens in the later episodes, as Lorna becomes less delusional and wrought.
The show also gives us a detective (played by the excellent Daryl McCormack, from “Bad Sisters”) who thinks Lorna might be involved in the murder of a priest in Dublin. In a twist of fate, he is an adoptee whose birth mother was also at the Laundries. That makes for an interesting rapport between him and his possible perp.
I liked everything in “The Woman in the Wall” that wasn’t presented from Lorna’s hazy perspective, and, overall, I was riveted. Its uncompromising approach to the horrors committed by people of God, and the women who were victimized by them, is admirable.