The Real Life Horrors of 'The Woman in the Wall'

By Chris Revelle | TV | January 30, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | TV | January 30, 2024 |

When I first started seeing ads for The Woman in the Wall (streaming now on Paramount+), I completely misapprehended the series as being entirely about the classic horror trope of unseen people within the walls of a building. The trope was memorably demonstrated in the Edgar Allen Poe story “The Cask of Amontillado,” and more recently homaged in Mike Flanagan’s Poe pastiche The Fall of the House of Usher, and also referenced in last year’s Lizzy Caplan gem Cobweb. Typically these are stories of hidden truths that warp and darken into monsters that hunt and haunt our protagonists. The Woman in the Wall is about dark, hidden truths that haunt our protagonists as well, but despite the horror film trappings that permeate the series like a creepy mist, the terrors are all too real.

Ruth Wilson (who was cursed to be on The Affair for 50 years) plays Lorna Brady, a troubled woman working as the assistant to a dressmaker in the fictional Irish town of Kilkinure. Lorna suffers from intense bouts of sleepwalking that lead her to wake in such places as the middle of a cow-path at dawn as cows curiously watch her. She’s regarded as the local mess, if people’s offhanded and casual ribbing of her is any indication, and she appears to live with severe mental health issues. Sleepwalking aside, Lorna is not well and it doesn’t seem as if many people in town are much help until we watch Lorna run into a kindly woman named Niamh at a local shop. They seem to know each other, and it’s through Niamh we begin to understand the shape of Lorna’s trauma: she was one of many “fallen women” sent to the Magdalene Laundry/mother and baby home to do what amounted to slave labor for the Kilkinure convent. “Fallen women” was the catch-all term used to describe sex workers, young women without familial support, and unmarried mothers. Lorna was the latter, sent to Kilkinure convent by her parents when they discovered she was pregnant. Under the guise of “helping” these people whom society desperately wanted to ignore, the nuns of the convent engaged in plenty of verbal, mental, and emotional abuse of their charges, which included taking the babies away once they were born. Lorna, like other young mothers at Kilkinure convent, had to watch as their infants were carried away, as they cried out for them in the delivery room and never saw them again.

As an American who had very little idea of this era of Irish history, what struck me the hardest was how recent this all was. The notion of sending a young girl to a convent to hush up her pregnancy feels very old world, if not outright medieval, and yet the Magdalene Laundry system operated from the 18th century all the way up until 1996, when the last of them was finally closed. Put another way: young women were being pressed into slave labor to avoid the indignity of unwed motherhood and had their babies snatched away from them as recently as 28 years ago. The inhumanity of it all is staggering. It’s particularly cruel that followers of Christ, a progressive figure who advocated for charity, community, and notably kindness for sex workers, would so ruthlessly dehumanize a group of vulnerable people. But, as one anchorite we meet on the show insists, “These girls were never destined to be mothers.” Though it can be hard to understand how people can cause such unspeakable pain and register their work as good, never doubt that some rationalization, however grotesque, absolutely exists in their minds.

The struggle to get the Irish state to recognize and redress these wrongs was a long one. In 2001, the Irish government admitted that the women of the laundries were victims of abuse but stopped short of an apology or any reparations. In 2011, the advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes presented their case to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, who in turn urged the Irish government to investigate. The Irish government embarked on an 18-month investigation and published a report in 2013 that found there was state participation in sending over 11,000 young women to the laundries since 1922. Notably, while the report found evidence of verbal abuse, it did not find evidence of physical or sexual abuse. The streaming series seems to suggest that some level of physical abuse was present (we hear a story about a girl having her nails trimmed so short that she’d bleed on her sheets and get in trouble for it), so it seems we’re meant to understand that even now, the government may not recognize the full extent of what happened. For whatever it’s worth, two weeks after the report was filed, the Irish government issued an official apology and offered compensation packages for victims. As of 2022, €32.8 million has been paid out to 814 survivors.

The Woman in the Wall posits the possibility that the women could be reunited with their lost children at the center of the mystery; a former nun is claiming she can connect some of the survivors to their babies. It does happen, though it doesn’t seem like a common occurrence. Whether the series handles the past of the Magdalene Laundries well is a matter of taste. While those experiences are central to the plot, and the show takes pains to educate its viewers about the history of the laundries, I feel the series is far too distracted by the surreal thriller/mystery framing it operates within. Slight spoilers, but the stories of young women at the laundries have to compete with the honestly somewhat pulpy story of Lorna finding a dead body in her home and hiding it behind a wall. Lorna sleuthing out the identity of the dead person as her sanity unravels (she stops sleeping to avoid sleepwalking) sits at odds with the rest of the show. The Woman in the Wall clearly wants us to internalize the very real stories of abuse and enslavement, but Lorna’s mystery makes it challenging to do so. We’re meant to see the real-world trauma as the reason the fictional Lorna is the way she is, but the phantasmagoric elements make it difficult for that real trauma to resonate. Instead of understanding what those real events could drive a person to do, we see those real events become the Freudian excuse for a level of drama that feels unreal.