‘The Woman in the Wall’ Review: Searching for a Daughter Taken by Nuns

On a road in the beautifully desolate Irish countryside, a passing steer stops to nose at the object in its path. It’s a sleeping woman whose white nightshirt is stained with blood. Jarred awake by the animal, she leaps to her feet in alarm and strides barefoot toward her village. A title tells us that it is 2015.

Lorna Brady, the heroine of the six-episode BBC miniseries “The Woman in the Wall” (which premiered Friday on Paramount+ and will air Sunday on Showtime), is seen by much of the village of Kilkinure as crazy. She’s foul-mouthed and angry, scornful and paranoid, and when she sleepwalks she can get violent — she once took an ax to the Virgin Mary. She’s not one to seek professional help, but we quickly see where some or all of her anger is coming from: her infant daughter was taken away from her 30 years before in a Catholic “mother and baby home,” and she hasn’t seen her since.

Lorna has developed her own variety of obsessive compulsion — she cares about little but her daughter, and her thoughts endlessly revisit what the nuns did to them. As played by the wickedly intelligent actress Ruth Wilson, though, Lorna is anything but one-note. Wilson, of “Luther” and “The Affair,” has a natural intensity that fits the character like a glove. But she also makes it clear that an unburdened Lorna would be practical and acerbically funny (if still a pain). It’s there in the way Lorna windmills her arms to get her blood moving before walking back to town, and in the comic charge she radiates when she gets in the face of every disdainful villager she passes.