Police series are always in fashion. We love solving a crime, no matter what style it is 'CSI' or 'Criminal Minds'; that goes into a false or real story or that presents us with characters that neither were nor fa or powerful female characters such as 'Vigil' either 'Mare of Easttown'.
This last series, one of Kate Winslet's great works of recent years, reminds us quite a bit 'The woman on the wall', the short police series of six episodes of about 50 minutes each one that is sweeping right now in Movistar Plus+ and on SkyShowtime and which is perfect to devour this coming weekend.
This series, which has a 7.2 on IMDb, has been created by Joe Murtagh, nominated for a BAFTA for the script of the British film 'Keep Calm' (2019) and takes us to Ireland, specifically to the fictional city of Kilkinure, in 2015. Its protagonist is Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson), a woman who suffers from sleepwalking.
One day, she heads to her job as a seamstress, but a note left for her about her long-missing daughter will take her down an unexpected path. She will embark on a journey in which she will discover decades of misdeeds, in which She will come across cases of child trafficking and that will force her to understand why a corpse appears by chance? in her house.
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Meanwhile, in Dublin, the detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack) investigates the murder of his childhood priest, Father Percy Sheehan. (Stephen Brennan). Her search for him takes her directly to Kilkinure and a convent that previously housed unwed mothers. It is the same home that Lorna was forced to enter when she was pregnant and she was 15 years old. Desperate to find out what happened to her stolen baby, despite being limited by her sleepwalking, Lorna becomes Akande's main suspect. And everything gets worse because he keeps a corpse on the wall of his living room.
'The woman on the wall' and the terrible story of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland
To understand the series you have to know what the Magdalena Laundries were. Managed by the Catholic Church from the 18th century until the mid-90s of the last century, These institutions were initially for prostitutes and later for 'immoral women' (single mothers, women expelled from their homes, who had lost their virginity before getting married, etc.). These women were used for their free labor to do horrible, heartbreaking laundry jobs. Pregnant women who ended up in laundromats had their babies taken away from them without your consent.
Lorna, the protagonist of 'The Woman in the Window', spent time in one of them, in the Kilkinure convent, which is terrifying enough for the series to overdo its horror elements (which it does). The dark and gloomy texture of the Irish countryside and Wilson's disturbing performance are enough to carry the series without so much sinister figure.
McCormack plays his big-city detective role effectively. frustrated by the slowness and lackadaisicalness of Kilkinure and his top police officer, Sergeant Aidan Massey (Simon Delaney). But as he gets closer to Lorna, he begins to reflect on what he went through in his childhood and ends up comparing the Father Percy he knew with the truth.
The best of all episodes is episode 4, which shows the devastating barbarity that Lorna and other women experienced at the hands of nuns and priests.. While some hide their trauma from her, or at least appear more fragile than problematic, Lorna is carried away by her anguish, driven by anger, bitterness, and revenge.
