Thanks to my increasing fear of cows – not so long ago, relatives of mine had to be airlifted to hospital having been brutally trampled – The Woman in the Wall made me anxious from the moment it began, when a woman we’d soon know as Lorna (Ruth Wilson) could be seen lying in a rural lane, her feet bare, her body covered by only a white nightdress. A sleepwalker, she’d wandered there in the dead of the night, and now she was waking up, only to find herself surrounded by huge great milkers.
How, I wondered, had the director shot this? Was there a farmer or another kind of cow-whisperer – someone, perhaps, from an agency for theatrical cattle – standing just behind the camera, ready to act if the beasts chose to walk over, rather than around, the human bump in the road?
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