Imagine a more horrifying situation: you wake up one morning to find a dead body in your house.
This is the premise of The Woman In The Wall, a new six-part thriller from BBC One and Showtime which will star Ruth Wilson as the unfortunate home-owner, and Daryl McCormack as the detective brought in to find out what is really going on.
Now the BBC has released first-look images for the upcoming show, along with a trailer – and both do nothing to dispel the idea that it’s going to be an utterly chilling watch.
Set in a fictional Irish town, the story follows what happens to Wilson’s Lorna Brady as she becomes one of the lead suspects in the case.
The body was found in her house, after all, and unfortunately for Brady, she’s known for her extreme sleepwalking tendencies – perhaps she could have caused the death of the woman while she was asleep? As a teenager, Brady was sent away to a convent to give birth, and had her baby taken away from her. This terrible experience continues to plague her until this day.
“As Colman searches for a murderer and Lorna searches for her daughter, their paths collide in ways they could never have anticipated,” says the show’s logline.
Although The Woman In The Wall is a murder-mystery at heart, the show promises to provoke conversations as it explores the legacy of The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland – Christian religious institutions where as many as 30,000 “fallen women” – women who were deemed outcasts of society, often because they had become pregnant outside of wedlock – were sent between the 18th and 20th centuries.
The series has been written and created by Joe Murtagh, who wrote the 2019 Irish crime drama film Calm with Horses, which starred Cosmo Jarvis and Barry Keoghan and was nominated for four BAFTAs.
This year Wilson starred as Virginia in The Young Vic’s The Second Woman, with her latest TV role being in the 2021 HBO TV film Oslo.
Meanwhile, Daryl McCormack has had a couple of busy years: after starring in Peaky Blinders (2019-2022), Matthew Claffin’s TV miniseries Bad Sisters (2022) and in Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), he has quickly become one of Ireland’s most sought-after talents.
