SERIES REVIEW: The Woman In The Wall

Eagle-eyed readers will be aware that I have already reviewed the first two episodes of this BBC series as stand-alones. However, as life got busier, it meant that I wasn’t able to complete the week-to-week reviews as I normally try to produce. Instead, I offer you this series review because I have continued to watch it (I just haven’t had time to sit down and write them all).

A quick recap is in order, then. We meet Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson), asleep in her nightie in the middle of a rural lane. It turns out that troubled Lorna has a habit of sleepwalking, and this particular sleepwalk is a doozy. Subsequently, we learn more about Lorna – she’s a loner, always walking quickly, eyes down, she lives in her own head, trying to reconcile memories and trauma from a stint in a mother and baby home she was sent to because she became pregnant as a teenager. A group of survivors from these institutions often meet in the town, plotting and planning to get justice for their terrible stints in the mother and baby homes. If not justice, just some clarification from the state that they had been emotionally and, sometimes, physically abused by nuns.

But it wasn’t just them… each of these young women had babies, and each of these women had them taken away from them, never to see them again. Naturally, each of these women was desperate to find out what happened to their children, to fill a hole in their lives, to fulfil a mother’s natural instinct to protect and nuture.

For Lorna, this need – the insatiable need – had gnawed away at her for three decades, affecting her mental and physical health badly. So when a nun called Aiofe from the very same mother and baby home she was incarcerated in got in touch telling her that she had information about her child, you better believe that Lorna couldn’t get to the pub meeting place fast enough. She woke up the next morning and found the nun dead in her spare room, with no recollection of how she got there or what had happened. She did what anyone would do (ahem) and stuffed her into a cavity in her front room wall and cemented up the hole.

Elsewhere, in Dublin, a priest involved with Lorna’s mother and baby home was found murdered in his home. Detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack) was tasked with investigating the case, and a lead took him to Kilkinure and into the world of Lorna Brady and the cast of characters inhabiting the town. After the first two episodes, some worried that the stereotypes of the quirky Irish townsfolk and their humour did not do this serious subject justice. However, after episode three – a really emotional and terrific episode – all those ideas of tonal imbalance were put to bed.

One of the survivors’ group had taken her own life, leaving Lorna to grapple with guilt, sorrow and yet more trauma, with her own mental health now really starting to unravel. Still determined not to sleep, she met Aoife’s daughter and together they went to the abandoned mother and baby at the edge of town to look for clues. Lorna found a big bag of documents, which, disturbingly and heartbreakingly, turned out to be death certificates – hundreds of death certificates detailing the fate of hundreds of children from the home. Including Lorna’s daughter, Agnes.

Lorna had always held out hope that she would find and be reunited with her daughter again, but now this discovery crushed her. She now had to grieve all over again. Can you possibly imagine that pain? It’s very difficult to comprehend.

All the while Akande was zeroing in on Lorna, and by the time they had a showdown Lorna was crushed enough to admit to murdering Aoife. And yet when she knocked down the wall to show Akande the body, there was no sign of it anywhere. The Woman In The Wall was not in the wall. It was a good twist.

And all that happened in episode three.

Akande was sent back to Dublin with his tail between his legs. He and Lorna were adversaries, but soon their stories would intertwine. As for Lorna, she went from finding out that her daughter was dead, to wanting to find where she was buried. This story was shifting angles all the time, and it began to become thrilling in a procedural sort of way. Lorna couldn’t find her daughter, but what she did find out was that the death certificates were fake… and, with some help from Akanda (who also found out the truth from his own childhood and experiences at a mother and baby home in Dublin), found out that even before these adoption services had shut down they were still selling babies to willing wannabe step-parents.

As the episodes ticked by, I sat there open-mouthed at the sheer horror of it all – remember, this is all based on elements of true stories of laundries and tales of abuse and mass graves – and then feeling admiration because to weave a thriller around these elements was just terrific work. The drama was really moving me on different levels.

In the end, Lorna found her peace, but the path towards that peace was rocky in the extreme. She was forced to ask herself tough questions about happiness, yearning and ownership. The rest of the townsfolk also had to ask themselves tough questions, too, coming to the stark realisation that anyone who stayed quiet about the mother and baby home during its hay day were complicit in its awful practices. This story offered them a chance to put things right, to an extent. That’s what stories of fiction do – they provide a beginning, middle and an end, with the bad guys often caught and brought to justice. However, we know that in the real world, survivors of these heinous laundries do not get that luxury. These brilliant, courageous women must live with the perceived shame, the guilt and their trauma every day of every year for the rest of their lives.

And this, I think, is what The Woman In The Wall was about – it was a study of shattered identities and that hollowed-out empty feeling you get when everlasting grief morphs from swooning panic to grinding, relentless pain. In fact, a cavity in the wall was the perfect metaphor for what Lorna and her fellow survivors must have been feeling – something missing. Something missing from the very foundations of their lives.

In the end, this was a superb series. Not everything landed just right, but goodness me, what an emotional story, and what an intensely moving denouement. What performances. What terrible hardships. What pain. What evil exists in this world.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow;
I am the diamond glints on the snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain;
I am the gentle autumn’s rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft star that shines at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there; I did not die.
Clare Harner, The Gypsy.

Paul Hirons

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

The Woman In The Wall is shown in the UK on BBC One and BBC iPlayer