TV Pick of the Week: The Woman in the Wall - review by Yvette Huddleston

Written by London-born Irish writer Joe Murtagh, it is inspired by the experiences of young women and girls who spent time in Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. Run by the Catholic Church and staffed by nuns, these were institutions where troublesome or pregnant girls were sent by their families, often on the advice of their local priest. The girls worked at the laundries for their keep, living in the attached mother and baby home until they gave birth, after which their babies were forcibly taken from them and offered up for adoption. The last of these laundries was closed only in 1996. Their painful legacy, however, lives on.

Murtagh’s script explores the lasting trauma and suffering for both the women and their children. Wilson plays Lorna Brady who lives in the small (fictional) town of Kilkinure in the West of Ireland and who was sent as a pregnant teenager to her local laundry. She is still haunted by what happened to her there and is living with the mental scars. She is terribly damaged emotionally, suffers terrifying flashbacks, struggles to relate to others and frequently sleepwalks. The striking opening image is of Lorna lying in her nightgown on a deserted rural road, surrounded by a small group of curious cows, with no recollection of how she got there.

After she receives an anonymous note from someone who claims to know what happened to her baby, Lorna arrives home following a heavy night in the pub. The next morning, she wakes up to find the dead body of a woman downstairs. She has no memory of what happened – could she be the murderer?

Meanwhile elderly priest Father Percy Sheehan has been killed in Dublin and his car is found abandoned near Kilkinure. When Dublin detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack) is assigned to investigate, it transpires that he has his own history with the laundries. As he begins to ask questions around town, Lorna decides to take action, enclosing the dead woman’s body behind a wall in her front room and beginning her own investigations. Meanwhile a group of local women, all survivors of the laundries, are campaigning for the state and church to acknowledge their culpability. As the mystery surrounding the murders unravels, the way in which the narrative threads are all pulled together is beautifully done.