The Woman In The Wall: Ruth Wilson Excels in A Mystery With Historical Trauma At Its Center

 

 

By now the constant television watcher knows that whenever you see a character played by Ruth Wilson, you can take anything she tells you at face value. It was true as early as her appearance in AMC’s failed remake of The Prisoner but after  made her very first appearance as the psychopathic Alice Morgan in Luther, the world knew it. It takes a great actress to be able to go head to head with Idris Elba and stay dead even; the fact that she managed to steal every scene she was in with him made you realize what a genius she was.

American audiences officially got welcomed to her in The Affair, one of the most underrecognized series by the Emmys in the 2010s. Both she and Wilson won Golden Globes for it in its first and best season, which is yet another reason I could never fully dismiss them. For all the flaws the show had during its run (and even the most devoted fans will admit they added up) Wilson’s performance as Alison Bailey, the married Montauk waitress who starts an affair with a married man based on a sense of loss, was a steadying force throughout. The nature of the series made it clear that you could never take any version of events as the whole story and that was always true with Alison. Even when her character was murdered, in one of the show’s greatest and most controversial episodes, you could not tell why it had happened.

Wilson’s next major role was the mysterious Mrs. Coulter on HBO’s adaptation of His Dark Materials. The estranged mother of Lyra, who spent her life showing one face while being another, no one could fully trust her throughout the books or the series.

Earlier this year Wilson took on the role of Lorna Brady in the BBC series The Woman in the Wall. Like many British series over the past several years (We Hunt Together and Back to Life are the most recent) it has begun its run on Showtime (now Paramount + on Showtime) the past few weeks. In it Wilson puts another twist on the kinds of unreliable narrators she plays because not even she can say with certainty about some of the things she’s done.

The series opens with Lorna awakening in her nightgown on a road by a cow. The first words out of her mouth are: “Oh that’s not good.” She gets back to her home – which is several miles from where she woke up and finds that there is a knife firmly embedded in a portrait of her lord and savior. “Sorry Jesus,” she says as she makes a concerted effort to pull it out.

Lorna suffers from extreme bouts of sleepwalking, and they have been going on for years. She’s already having a bad day when she goes to a pub, has an argument with someone who claims to know her and passes out. She regains consciousness the next day – and finds a dead woman in her home.

We are all familiar with the setup of the innocent person being wrongly accused, and only they knowing that they are innocent of the crime, even as the evidence piles up against them. The Woman in the Wall  puts a twist on this because the person accused isn’t sure she is innocent. As we see by the end of the first episode, Lorna gets up without knowing it, tears through things in her closet until she finds what she’s looking for, walks down the entire town with an axe in her head, chops open a stable that is holding a car, pours petrol on it and only wakes up and realizes what happened when the car explodes. By the start of the next episode she has scrawled STAY AWAKE in huge letters on one of her walls. We all know there’s only so long a person can do this without going mad – and watching her throughout the first two episodes, that’s not a far drop.

Parallel with this is an investigation in Dublin of a parish priest named Father Percy by Detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack, most recently seen in Bad Sisters) The murder hits home because he actually knew this priest. When the priest’s car turns up off the side of the road not far from where Lorna lives, it’s an inevitability their lives will intersect – particularly because the dead woman and the priest have more in common than their location.

The murdered priest helped Colman as a foster youth and helped him get him on the right path. He takes the killing personally and his shocked when he learns not only was the priest known to the townspeople but there were many citizens who would love to see him dead beforehand. The father was one of the clergy involved in a particularly shameful path in the Irish Catholic Church’s history: the Magdalene Laundries. (The series takes place in 2015.) Many of the survivors are in the town, and it should come as little shock that Laura was one of them.

These women who were ‘troublemakers’ (read they got pregnant at a young age) were ‘taken in’ by the church and forced to work in their laundries for no wages and were subject to horrific abuse. Flashbacks show the physical and psychological torture these girls were put through. In many cases, they were promised they would be reunited with their babies and had that promise constantly taken away because they didn’t ‘Show Thyself a Mother’. When Colman meets one of the mother superiors involved she remains utterly unrepentant both in what happened and whether these girls deserved to be mothers in the first place.

We eventually learn the murdered woman was a former sister at the laundry who could not accept the practices and left the parish. She got married to a man and they were heading to Lorna’s town. It is possible that Aoife murdered the priest (its still not clear yet) but Aoife was planning to see Lorna with news on what happened to her child. The question is, how did Aoife’s die and did Lorna kill her?

Wilson plays a character unlike most of the ones she is famous for playing. Usually her characters, while emotionally damaged, have managed a façade of toughness however false. In Lorna’s case the trauma she has undergone has damaged her so badly that even before she wakes up with a body in her home, she barely seems able to function in her small town. It’s not much of an exaggeration that she seems more energetic when she’s sleepwalking: she certainly seems to have a sense of purpose and determination that is absent in her when she’s awake.

It's also clear that her behavior has isolated her even among her fellow survivors: at an early meeting she is reluctant to even be there, and when she comes to a later one (fishing for information) it’s clear that she is resented by them. In part this is due to a betrayal felt by a friend of hers in the laundry Clemence, who if anything is more damaged then her. It’s clear that this was never her fault: both girls had been lied to horribly by the sisters – but the emotional scars are, if anything, deeper than the physical ones. Clemence makes a promise during the second episode to tell Lorna what happened to her baby; she commits suicide that night.

The Woman in the Wall is about shame and trauma. Not even Colman is exempt from it. Chasing after Lorna during the episode, he flashes back to his childhood and later on has a panic attack in the car with the local sergeant. It’s clear there’s a deeper trauma going on that the series hasn’t touched on yet. There’s also the shame the village is clearly going through that Colman touches on when he demands to know how this could have happened and no one knew. “There’s knowing and then there’s knowing’” is the answer that he gets. It is both a denial and part of a universal truth that we all go through when things like the scandals here are exposed.

You have your choice of mysteries to watch on Sundays and Woman In The Wall is running against True Detective: Night Country, another mystery with a brilliant actress at its center. It’s clear after two episodes (honestly it was clear after fifteen minutes) that Woman in the Wall is better written, performed, and has a far more interesting subject at its center than what we see in Ennis. Make no mistake there’s also a supernatural element to it too – the episode deals with a local legend and the rhyme about her, narrated by Wilson, is the first things we here in the episode.  But there’s no pretense that banshees are involved in the murders that happened – just the kind of trauma that can last for decades if it is not solved. I felt more deeply for Lorna Brady than I did for either Danvers or Navarro in True Detective, All of these women are looking for answers to a murder that has its origins in the past but Lorna’s the only one who is out of her depth from the start, and where finding out why the murder took place won’t begin to solve the problems she has. Lorna already knows that even if you ask the right question, the answer may never make you whole.

My score: 4.25 stars.