Ruth Wilson Fumbles Through a Snooze-Fest

The Magdalene Laundries are a phenomenon largely unacknowledged by the world outside of Ireland. As religious institutions that popped up as early as the eighteenth century, these “asylums” incarcerated so-called fallen women, everyone from sex workers to young girls who’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock, forcing them to work in grueling, inhumane conditions in the laundries of convents. The women in these laundries were subject to violent physical and psychological abuse, and many died there, swept under the rug by both the church and the state, with the last of the institutions closing in 1996, only two short years before this author was born.

The horrifying truth of the laundries is the story behind The Woman in the Wall, Showtime’s newest drama starring Ruth Wilson as Lorna Brady, a former victim of a (fictional) Magdalene Laundry whose baby was taken from her at birth. When her sleepwalking fits — caused by the trauma she experienced in the laundry — land her in trouble that could potentially lead to prison, her life collides with that of Detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack), an officer from Dublin investigating the murder of a priest. When the two discover that the priest was linked to strange goings-on in the laundry Lorna was incarcerated in, they find themselves going down a dangerous path, one that exposes the dark depths of evil present just under their noses in the church.

‘The Woman in the Wall’ Makes a Mess of Its Mystery

To put it simply, The Woman in the Wall is running in five directions at once, a herd of cows escaped from their pasture a la the particularly disastrous grocery scene in Withnail and I. It can’t decide what portion of its crime it wants to focus on, splitting hairs to follow a multitude of clues and suspects down roads that often lead nowhere. Even with my notes, I had trouble following how Lorna and Akande got from point A to point B, and it seems like the show’s writers bit off far more than they could chew attempting to tackle something as widespread and insidious as the Magdalene Laundries. The show initially seems fueled almost entirely by the concept of Catholic guilt but doesn’t bother to build the foundations necessary to understand why such an issue would plague all its characters, not just the women who were trapped in the convent.

What little we do get in the way of satisfying discoveries is saved for after the point when I imagine most viewers will have dropped off — that is to say, far too late in the game, when we’ve spent almost six collective hours wondering when the hell something’s actually going to happen, as opposed to watching Lorna run around in circles, depriving herself of sleep and being generally uninteresting. The Woman in the Wall puts far too much stake in itself as a character drama, even though the characters are largely flat and stale beyond their dramatic backstories, which have been done with far more nuance and care in other projects, including those also featuring Wilson and McCormack.

‘The Woman in the Wall’ Lacks Characters With Heart or Conviction

It’s the worst with Lorna, whose clear mental instability is used for shock value rather than sympathy, in a narrative that can’t decide whether she’s worthy of the audience’s trust or simply an unreliable narrator. She’s a non-entity in her own story, simply floating through scenes like she is, in fact, sleepwalking, despite her fervent attempts to stay awake. I know Wilson is capable of playing mentally unstable characters with panache — I’ve not seen Luther a million times for no reason — but Lorna lacks any kind of real personality, all instances of human emotion or anything that might make her compelling beaten out of her by her time in the laundry.

That might be a convincing argument to make in her favor, if McCormack weren’t also delivering a rote, flat performance as Detective Akande, despite his character’s deeply personal investment in Lorna’s predicament. It’s a major downgrade from his role in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, and I can’t decide whether it’s the fault of the script or simply everyone else around him for pinning him into scenes that feel like homework to get through. The only solid performances come from the show’s minor characters — notably Simon Delaney, who shows more heartbreak and anger as the sergeant assisting Akande than the show’s primary protagonists, with a scene in the final act of the show that made sitting through the rest of the slow, grating drama almost worth it in five short minutes.

‘The Woman in the Wall’ Does a Disservice to Laundry Victims

But what’s most egregious is the fact that the show couldn’t even bother to cast an Irish actress as Lorna. In a story about the Magdalene Laundries, abusive systems that millions of real Irish women suffered in for nearly two centuries, Wilson waltzes in as an English actress with no connection to the country, bringing a subpar performance that does a disservice to the memory of all those who languished at the hands of the church. Never mind that Lorna hardly speaks, because when she does the voice coming out of her sounds like a bad party trick, a cruel imitation of Irish voices, especially when surrounded by a multitude of Irish actresses putting on a far better show than she is. Hilda Fay is a notable standout, knocking Wilson’s performance so far out of the park as fellow laundry victim Amy Kane that it makes me question why she wasn’t cast as Lorna instead.

It’s a slap in the face on top of a story that already makes a mockery of the real-life tragedy, as though the women incarcerated needed to be made out as suffering more than they already did, without any kind of decent ending to an already flawed series. Sure, there’s an argument to be made that those women are far from any kind of closure, even despite the Irish government’s compensation scheme, but there’s a difference between representing the flaws in the justice system and simple messy storytelling. Nothing feels finished in The Woman in the Wall, like a half-edited draft gone to print instead of a fully-formed piece of work. It’s as dissatisfying as any of the many other police procedurals cranked out by networks and streamers by the dozen, and not worth the price of admission for Showtime, which continues to prove that it’s barely a decent addition to Paramount+.

The Woman in the Wall premieres on Paramount+ with Showtime on January 19 in the U.S., before premiering linearly on January 21 at 9 p.m. ET.

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