“The Woman in the Wall,” starring Ruth Wilson, combines elements of “Broadchurch,” “True Detective” and “Twin Peaks” with an idyllic Irish setting.
The outcomes are tonally throughout the place, however it’s intriguing.
Airing Sunday nights at 9 p.m. (Showtime) and streaming on Paramount+ (it aired on the BBC in the UK), the story is about in 2015 in the fictional town of Kilkinure.
It opens up with Lorna (Wilson) asleep and waking up in the middle of a quiet country lane. No one is around apart from grass and cows, and there’s a spot of blood on her nightgown.
When she goes home, she finds a knife lodged into a painting of Jesus Christ on her wall, and removes it, saying, “That’s not good. Sorry, Jesus,” which adds to the whimsical, dark fairytale feel of the opening sequence.
Nevertheless, after that surreal start (and a few other weird intervals), “The Woman in the Wall” takes a more grounded turn towards a detective show, and dives into some “ripped from the headlines” social issues that unpack a grim history.
The story also follows Detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack) in Dublin, who’s investigating the murder of his childhood priest, Father Percy Sheehan.
The case leads him to Kilkinure, where his story dovetails with Lorna’s.
It seems that when Lorna was 15 and pregnant, she was sent to one among Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, a real church-run institution where so-called “immoral women,” equivalent to pregnant teens out-of-wedlock, endured harrowing living conditions, frequent abuse and harsh work.
And, Lorna’s baby was taken away from her.
Father Percy was involved in this group home and police turn out to be suspicious of Lorna and other women who spent their youth there.
Making matters more complicated, that is a bad time for Lorna to draw attention from authorities, since she also finds a dead woman in her home in a crime that’s seemingly unrelated to Father Percy’s murder.
Since Lorna has had sleepwalking incidents after her teen trauma, she doesn’t know if she’s answerable for the corpse.
She also gets a hint about her long-lost daughter’s whereabouts, and her past connects to Detective Akande’s in an unexpected way.
Although all of that is interesting, it doesn’t all the time mesh together neatly.
At times, the show’s combination of police procedural combines awkwardly with whimsical elements like the surreal and darkly comic opening sequence.
And, while the show’s have a look at the real tragic history of Magdalene Laundries is appropriately disturbing, that “ripped from the headlines” material doesn’t all the time mix together well with the remainder of the series’ material.
But the disparate plotlines are interesting, even after they don’t mix. The scenery of quaint small-town Ireland is gorgeous. And Wilson, 42, who won a Golden Globe for “The Affair,” delivers a strong performance of a woman who’s seething with anger and trauma — while unraveling at the seams.
“The Woman in the Wall” is a show that seems like it doesn’t quite know what it’s aiming to be and throwing a lot of elements at the wall to see what sticks.
That does, nonetheless, also slot into the tradition of crime drama procedurals with social issues – “True Detective,” AMC’s “Dark Winds.”
The show is messy, however it’s never boring.