Need a dark and twisty thriller to open up 2024 with? Well, Showtime may have horror and crime fans covered there with “The Woman In The Wall,” ready to premiere on the network and streamer later this month. And readers across the pond may already be familiar with the series. It premiered on BBC One last summer, with critical acclaim causing Showtime to snatch it up.
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But “The Woman In The Wall” is no ordinary thriller series. Instead, it’s a hybrid show of sorts that takes inspiration from one of Ireland’s most notorious modern scandals: The Magdalene Laundries. Madgalene was an asylum that housed promiscuous women and prostitutes that the Catholic Church deemed “fallen women,” separating them from their children to do menial labor without pay and meager rations. The Laundry’s controversial legacy sets the stage for the six-episode series.
Ruth Wilson stars in “The Woman In The Wall” as Lorna, a woman living in the fictional town of Kilkinure who wakes up one morning to discover a corpse in her house. That’s terrifying enough, but Lorna’s reputation doesn’t help things. Kilkinure residents know that she sleepwalks a lot and tends to do dangerous things while doing so. As Lorna tries to solve the mystery and prove her innocence, a detective arrives in Kilkinure for a different reason entirely. But the policeman also has secrets of his own, and his path and Lorna’s align in unexpected ways.
Created and written by BAFTA Award nominee Joe Murtagh, “The Woman In The Wall” also stars Daryl McCormack, Simon Delaney, Philippa Dunne, Mark Huberman, Hilda Fay, Frances Tomelty, and Dermot Crowley.
Wilson talked to EW about the upcoming series to hype up its new trailer, praising the show’s brilliant threading of genres. “I thought it’s such a smart way to get a really quite important story out there and kind of hide it through genre and get people hopefully attracted to the material for those genre tropes, for the horror of it, for the crime in it, for the black comedy humor in it, which is also quite Irish in its sensibility,” said the actress. “But actually underneath you are drawing the audience to a more important story at the heart of it and hoping that they will start to dig a bit deeper into that or learn something else from it as well.”
“The Woman In The Wall” hits Paramount+ on January 19, then makes its on-air premiere on Showtime on January 21 at 9p. Watch the trailer for the BBC One series below.