Daryl McCormack, Ruth Wilson
“WOMAN IN THE WALL”(Paramount+): Brit thesp Ruth Wilson has been so good in so many varied roles (“Mrs. Wilson,” “Luther,” “The Affair”) that it’s easy to take her for granted.
But her lacerating work in “The Woman in the Wall“ cuts so deep that viewers cannot escape the madness at the core of her compelling/prickly character.
Wilson plays Lorna Brady, a middle-aged resident of a small Irish burg where she’s regarded as a local oddity. Lorna lives alone, is prone to epic episodes of sleepwalking (one morning she awakens on a country road surrounded by sheep) and is majorly depressed, the result of a long-ago encounter with the Magdalene Sisters.
The Magdalene system, of course, was the Church- and state-sanctioned enterprise which for more than a century in Ireland took in unmarried pregnant girls and put them to work as laundresses. These unfortunates were usually disowned by their scandalized families; most gave their children up for adoption and many lived their entire lives as Magdalenes in circumstances approaching slavery.
Wilson’s Lorna is haunted by the traumas of her youth. She is anti-religious and anti-authoritarian and so angry she cannot see straight.
And sad. God, is she sad.
“The Woman in the Wall” follows Lorna’s quest to discover what happened to the child she birthed decades earlier, but it’s mixed in with a murder mystery.
A priest once involved with the local Magadelene laundry is found murdered. Suspicion quickly falls on Lorna, whose hatred of the sisterhood is local legend.
Investigating is a police detective from the big city, Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack), who, as fate would have it, was himself born to one of those fallen women and adopted by a loving family — but not before living several years in an orphanage about which he still has Dickensian-level nightmares.
Lorna and Colman form an unlikely alliance; even though she’s a prime suspect in the murder, the cop feels a kinship because of their shared horrors.
But we know something about Lorna that the other characters don’t…Lorna has had a fatal encounter with a former Magdalene nun, whose body she deposits behind the wall of her parlor.
Shades of Edgar Allan Poe!
Well, the dead woman’s heart doesn’t beat so loud you can hear it, but Lorna, consumed by guilt and fear, is nonetheless pushed to the edge of sanity.
Truth be told, the titular woman in the wall is one of the few elements in the series from creator Joe Murtagh that feels forced and phony. It’s too melodramatic and coincidental by half.
The rest of the show, though, is a brutally honest look at one of Ireland’s recurring bad dreams (hardly a year goes by without some new horrifying revelation about the now-defunct Magdalenes) and the fallout that continues to upend lives.
One leaves the series feeling that some small mysteries have been solved, but that true accountability for decades of abuse may never arrive.
But watching Ruth Wilson do her thing almost makes all the trauma worthwhile.
Donald Glover, Maya Erskine
“MR. AND MRS. SMITH”(Prime): Poised between dark humor and pulse-pumping action, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is so watchable that for most of its first season you may not notice it’s really not going anywhere.
Or anyway it sometimes seems it’s going nowhere. Just wait until Episode 8.
This is just the latest spinoff of a concept — a marriage of two deadly assassins — that began with a 1996 TV series starring Scott Bakula and Maria Bello and was resurrected as a 2005 feature with real-life items Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Our happy-ish couple are John and Jane (Donald Glover, Maya Erskine) who are recruited by a massively secret espionage operation, are ordered to marry one another and become John and Jane Smith (they don’t even know each other’s real name) and are regularly sent off on missions that test not only their secret agent skills but their marital tolerances.
Glover (who produced the series) and Erskine are hugely watchable, and the fact that they represent racial minorities gives “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” a little extra oomph in the sociological fallout department.
Here’s the weird thing…although they are given a posh Manhattan townhouse and a big salary, John and Jane know next to nothing about their employers. They communicate with their boss — they call him Hi-Hi — exclusively through the internet.
Nor are they told why they’re doing what they’re doing. No time for ethical hair-splitting. Just get the mission over with, go home and heat up the bedroom with post-homicidal passion.
Most of the episodes in Season One are placeholders, adhering to a similar setup and essentially repeating the same notes with different supporting characters.
Keeping things interesting is an impressive array single episode co-stars (Sharon Horgan, Alexander Skarsgard, Billy Campbell, Sarah Paiulson, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman, John Turturro, Paul Dano).
And with each episode we get a few more intimations about just what our amoral lovers have gotten themselves into. Apparently the only way to get a divorce in this world is with a well-placed bullet.
The season climaxes with the niftiest episode yet, in which the Smiths turn their weaponry on each other, not realizing they’re being set up by powers unseen. And smack dab in the middle is a great stretch of dialogue in which the title couple, under the effect of a potent truth serum, finally come clean with each other, laying bare the essentials of their greasy little hearts.
It all ends on a cliffhanger, but even if we don’t get a Season 2, this one is worth checking out.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 