Simon Stone’s mystery/thriller The Woman in Cabin 10 follows an intriguing, Agatha-adjacent premise: the determined and persistent Laura “Lo” Blacklock (Keira Knightley), a successful investigative journalist still recovering from the trauma of witnessing a source’s death, receives an invitation from Anne Bullmer (Lisa Loven Kongsil), a terminally ill billionaire who’s eager to launch a charitable foundation with his husband Richard (Guy Pearce) before her death. Laura sees this as an opportunity to take a short, relaxing break from the painstaking demands of hard-hitting journalism; she gets a less burdensome assignment in the form of writing about the organization, while simultaneously indulging luxury leisure time afforded by the getaway’s superyacht setting. And so, Laura and a group of wealthy, high-maintenance guests board the Bullmers’ deluxe sailing vessel, en route to the fundraising gala in Norway. But before the first night of the cruise elapses, Laura witnesses a passenger tragically fall overboard, an anonymous young woman whom none of the guests nor the crew claims to have ever seen on board.
Adapted from Ruth Ware’s runaway bestseller of the same name, it’s evident from the jump that The Woman in Cabin 10 intends to deliver a modern mystery that is hard-boiled in much the same manner as Agatha Christie’s famous works, while also twisting itself into the shape of a light capitalist critique (though of course, never as chaotic or grotesque as something like Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, for example). Sticking to a familiar template, then, it perhaps shouldn’t surprise that very little works here as it should, despite Knightley’s naturalistic and instinctive performance. Her presence — pulling off a delightful, somehow even relaxed combination of geniality, self-doubt, consuming fright, and finally strength — anchors the film amid its otherwise waterlogged narrative, as the rest of the characters either remain lazily underdeveloped or, worse, stereotypically cartoonish. And none of this is helped by the fact that the film’s visual design is wrapped in Netflix’s chic house style, delivering soullessly sleek production design and a cold, bluish color palette.
But the most crucial problem in Stone’s The Woman in Cabin 10 isn’t just that most viewers will be able to predict blindfolded who’s behind the mystery from the film’s earliest stages, but that the film — via a mixture of both script and execution issues — fails ever to develop any real tension or suspense. There’s an unforgivable insouciance that pervades the proceedings, which, in the absence of any subtlety, creativity, and cleverness otherwise, simply causes the film to degrade into a formulaic arc that will force most viewers to rightly dismiss the project as the result of hacky decisions that resemble an A.I. mystery milkshake more than anything.
In fairness, however, for most of The Woman in Cabin 10‘s runtime, even as little of the film provokes the audience in interesting ways, its baseline framework manages to keep things at least mildly engaging, igniting scattered bits and crumbs of curiosities without ever devolving into outright disaster. That is, until the film reaches its final (and so-called “climactic”) act, wherein the lavish yacht reaches Norway and Laura must perilously make her way to the gala in order to unmask the villain. At this point, everything utterly and thoroughly collapses, and The Woman in Cabin 10‘s heretofore mediocrity takes a marked right turn into profoundly laughable ludicrousness. Indeed, it’s all so ill-conceived that one wonders what exactly was on the table when this was greenlit beyond the book’s lingering cachet, because the final product is among the more disposable products Netflix has delivered recently. In failing to deliver any gripping thriller elements or a compelling whodunnit throughline, The Woman in Cabin 10 charts about as safe a course as possible, stopping over for only a few cheap thrills along the way. By the film’s final shot, it’s easy to see that this ship was sinking from the moment it launched.
DIRECTOR: Simon Stone; CAST: Keira Knightley, Guy Pearce, Hannah Waddingham, Kaya Scodelario, David Morrissey; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: October 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
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