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

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    Ruth Wilson plays an Irish woman with a case against the Catholic church in an ecclesiastical thriller that’s also a murder mystery.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Television

      Ruth Wilson on the True Horrors of ‘The Woman in the Wall’

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      Her fictional character lives in an unstable reality and may have killed someone. But the history of Ireland’s notorious “Magdalene laundries” is all too real.Ruth Wilson has ducked into a cabin in the French Alps, taking a break from an activity she enjoys when she isn’t acting. “I’ve been skiing this week,” she said last week in a video interview. “It’s been a passion for years. It’s very dangerous. I can go head-down into something.”She said that last part with a smile. Wilson, an English actress known for playing Idris Elba’s psychopathic nemesis in “Luther,” likes going to extremes and working without a net. Last year, at the Young Vic theater in London, she tested her endurance in “The Second Woman,” a 24-hour production in which her character goes through the same breakup scene 100 times, with 100 different scene partners. (Some, like Elba and Toby Jones, were trained actors; most were not.) For her first professional Shakespeare assignment, a 2019 Broadway production of “King Lear,” she played both Cordelia and the king’s Fool (opposite Glenda Jackson’s Lear).Wilson’s latest role, in the limited series “The Woman in the Wall,” is no less daunting. (It premieres on Friday on Paramount+ With Showtime, having debuted in Britain in August.) She plays Lorna, a woman haunted by her years at one of Ireland’s “Magdalene laundries,” at least a dozen of which operated across the country from the 19th century until the last one closed in 1996. Run by Catholic nuns, the mostly for-profit laundries used unmarried, pregnant and otherwise ostracized women for hard, unpaid labor, often after mothers were forcibly separated from their children.Lorna, who is packed off to a fictional laundry at age 15, wants desperately to find her daughter. Like many babies born to unwed Irish mothers like Lorna, she was sold into adoption against her mother’s will. Hundreds of others are buried in unmarked graves.“We’re trying to land on what it must feel like for some of these women from the laundries, for this constant trauma to be coming back,” Wilson (with Frances Tomelty) said.Chris Barr/BBC with Paramount+ and ShowtimeAs the series begins, Lorna, a chronic sleepwalker and outcast, is startled to find a dead body in her home. This happens around the same time a popular priest is found murdered. The six-episode series leans into Lorna’s tortured perception and subjective experience; she is antisocial and unstable but also the target of gaslighting by those in her seaside Irish town who insist that nothing all that bad happened to her when she was young.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Movies

      ‘True Things’ Review: Escape Routes

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      This character study from Harry Wootliff bottles the lightning of a torrid fling.Harry Wootliff’s “True Things” bottles the lightning of a torrid fling in its closely observed character study of Kate, a bored British social worker who feels stuck. Tom Burke plays a charming bloke, recently released from prison, who comes in for a benefits claim and ends up asking her out. “I will keep that in mind,” Kate (Ruth Wilson) responds, intrigued but trying not to smile.Wootliff and her superb leads fully inhabit what’s essentially an extended chapter in Kate’s life, at once pivotal and fleeting. She and her fellow have sex in a number of places; he earns a spot in her phone contacts as simply “Blond” because of his frosted hair. Kate gets attached, but (or is that because?) the man has a habit of disappearing. When he borrows her car for a week for unknown purposes, it seems to confirm the suspicions of Kate’s friend (a note-perfect Hayley Squires) that he’s a shady bounder.What makes the film’s episodic approach flow is the pulse-sensitive camerawork. It’s worth singling out, because it is the kind that is often described as “intimate” but rarely pulled off with such Maysles-esque aplomb. The cinematographer, Ashley Connor, knits together relations among bodies in space beautifully — and meaningfully — especially between Wilson and Burke, who exerts a similar hold here as his character in “The Souvenir” (in a different key and class).Wilson is able to bring a light touch to her teetering character, as we hold our breath and watch her face to see where Kate lands.True ThingsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theater and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More