‘The Woman in the Wall’ Review: An Anguished Irish Past

Ruth Wilson provides a ferocious efficiency in “The Woman in the Wall” (suppose Edgar Allan Poe) and the present’s mysteries are many. But one realizes early on why so little fiction builds itself round genuinely disturbed characters. The protagonist is our avatar. And if we will’t belief ourselves, properly, whom can we belief?

Not Lorna Brady. The unreliable centerpiece of this six-part sequence is portrayed by Ms. Wilson with a risky mixture of anger, remorse and grief. But a lot is filtered via the unstable lens of her perceptions—together with hallucinations, flashes of unreliable reminiscence and fragments of nightmare—that we aren’t positive precisely what to consider. At least not on the outset.