The Woman In The Wall review: Ruth Wilson is a marvel in this intense psychological mystery

“Do not stand / By my grave, and weep. / I am not there, / I do not sleep.” So begins the well-known bereavement poem by Clare Harner used to bookend The Woman In The Wall—lines that accrue layers of meaning as this intense psychological mystery plays out. Per the title of this new series, which premieres January 19 on Paramount+ with Showtime, a lady is immured, but whether she stays put is another question. There’s also a staggering number of babies recorded deceased at an Irish convent, whose graves are nowhere to be found. Then there’s Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson), a wary loner whose long-term grief and chronic sleepwalking has left her stranded between life and death. She scrawls “STAY AWAKE” on her palm; bad things happen when Lorna dozes.

Written by Joe Murtagh (Calm With Horses) and executive produced by Wilson, the series (broadcast last year on BBC One) gets off to a spooky start with mysterious religious imagery. Lorna awakens in a road in rural Ireland one morning, wearing a white cotton nightdress and surrounded by curious cows. There’s a shard of glass in the palm of her hand (stigmata alert!). In a daze, Lorna walks barefoot back home to her (fictional) town of Kilkinure. Right off we know our protagonist has a slippery POV (shades of The Girl On The Train), an unsteady grasp of reality that’s sure to jolt the narrative.

Lorna works as a seamstress in a tailor’s shop. She’s grim, taciturn, and resistant to anyone’s offer of connection or care. A group of Kilkinure women are working with a soft-spoken activist (Dermot Crowley) who promises to get government recognition of and reparation for decades of abuse at the so-called “Magdalene Laundries” for decades. Lorna is one of them, but she keeps a skeptical distance from the group. If you happen to be Irish or saw the 2013 Judi Dench/Steve Coogan movie Philomena, you know about the “Magdalene Girls”—pregnant teens, taken in by nuns, who had their newborns put up for adoption against the mothers’ wills. Lorna was shipped off to Kilkinure’s Sisters of the Seven Joys, where she gave birth and was brutally separated from her child. Ever since, Lorna has lived a numb, antisocial existence, grief mixed with guilt about how she betrayed another girl to the nuns.

Around the time Lorna gets a mysterious handwritten note saying, “I know what happened to your child,” Dublin police discover the body of Father Percy Sheen (Stephen Brennan), murdered at home. Father Percy had a long history with the Sisters of the Seven Joys, and we see in Lorna’s flashbacks how he personally delivered her to the convent. The dead priest’s car was stolen and abandoned off a road in Kilkinure. Detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack) is assigned to the case. Like Lorna, Akande is personally connected to the cleric: Father Percy acted as Colman’s protector when Akande was separated from his birth mother (nuns, again, naturally) and put up for adoption. Colman’s fond memories of Father Percy are bound to warp and darken as he digs into the mystery of his death.

The Woman In The Wall runs on two tracks: It’s a police procedural in a small town while also a breakdown horror story as Lorna battles traumatic flashbacks, bouts of sleepwalking, and the fear she killed someone while in a fugue state. The first half of the series keeps us wondering whether Lorna might be the killer, or even a serial killer. Colman also suspects Lorna of hiding something, but once Lorna finds proof that babies have gone missing, trafficked by a sinister adoption agency, they join forces. Colman begins to question the circumstances of his own adoption, and Lorna tracks down the daughter of a fellow Magdalene survivor. If in its back end the series devolves into a more formulaic whodunit and tale of Catholic Church coverups, the fine cast keeps you emotionally engaged and the filmmaking is fairly lush, with Harry Wootliff and Rachna Suri alternating directing duties on the six-episode season.

Wilson (The Affair, His Dark Materials) is a bloody-minded marvel. She embodies a woman imploding while awake and exploding while asleep. Lorna has a haunted, haggard look through most of the series; her body is falling apart from stress and lack of sleep. No actorly vanity here. She picks at bloody eczema on her neck, and even sprinkles Tabasco sauce on her eyeballs to stay awake, causing her to bleed from the eyes. “I can’t tell what’s real anymore,” Lorna mutters. “I’m seeing things and hearing things that aren’t there.” It’s a brave and visceral turn, gritty and driven, showcasing Wilson’s live-wire physicality and a rich, peaty Irish brogue.

McCormack, charming and breezy in 2022’s Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, gets to show his brooding side, with plenty of vulnerable moments as submerged childhood memories bubble up to interfere—and help—with Colman’s investigation. Simon Delaney adds humorous local color as the Kilkinure police chief whose complacence is goaded into action. As an embittered ex-Magdalene Girl, Hilda Fay gives Wilson a run for gutsy scene-stealing. And the radiant Abby Fitz does heavy lifting as Young Lorna, whose mistreatment at the convent justifies Wilson’s adult dysfunction. Nearly all the nuns are, no surprise, sadists in wimples. In one particularly cruel scene, teenage Lorna begs to hold her infant and, as she wanders a nursery full of newborns, realizes with horror she can’t tell which is her daughter. “And you call yourself a mother?” sneers Sister Eileen (Aoibhinn McGinnity) with a satanic smirk.

Handsomely shot by Si Bell, each episode includes artful touches, such as an early sequence which cuts between Lorna working the scissors on a wedding dress and her younger self’s agony giving birth at the Magdalene Laundry. The white sheets of Lorna’s bed become the lace, and the snipping of her scissors, amplified, transform into the severing of the umbilical cord. In a later episode, a visit to an abandoned house where teens used to go to party and hook up becomes a red-lit haunted house that Lorna wanders with a flashlight, finding rooms full of empty cribs from which ghostly baby cries emanate. (Robert Brazier’s gooseflesh-raising sound design—sonic clouds of creepy whispers and prayers—is quite good.) In contrast to a lot of default cinematography these days, Bell lights scenes for clarity and mood, not blue-gray murk. Even hellish hallucinations pop and have vibrancy, with evocative green and red washes for nightmares and flashbacks.

If you’re a lapsed Catholic or adopted, or both (guilty!), The Woman In The Wall may be triggering—in the cathartic, damn-the-church and pass the tissues sort of way. Even if you don’t have skin in the game, there’s nothing quite as exciting as Ruth Wilson taking an axe to her living room wall like an avenging banshee.

The Woman In The Wall premieres January 19 on Paramount+ with Showtime