For her third straight streaming effort, Keira Knightley is a crusading journalist cosplaying as Miss Marple in The Woman in Cabin 10, a whodunnit whose mystery will be quickly solved by any viewer capable of staying awake through the film’s first 20 minutes.
As far as Agatha Christie wannabes go, Simon Stone’s Netflix feature, premiering Oct. 10, is near the bottom of the barrel, doing nothing right—but plenty wrong—on its way to revelations that would cause the Queen of Crime to throw up her hands in exasperation. A thriller in name only, it has all the grace and cunning of an anvil to the head.
The Woman in Cabin 10 was written by Stone, Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse based on an Emma Frost adaptation of Ruth Ware’s novel, and that lineage is the most inscrutable thing about this venture.
The story concerns Laura “Lo” Blacklock (Knightley), a reporter who’s so good at what she does that when she enters her office, people immediately congratulate her on a job well done. Following her latest investigative triumph on behalf of persecuted women, her boss Rowan (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) suggests that she take some well-earned time off.
Instead, Lo says she’s going to accept an invitation to join Norwegian shipping heiress Anne Lyngstad (Lisa Loven Kongsli) on a three-day cruise on a super yacht. Anne’s husband Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce) is setting up a foundation in her name and is hosting board members to raise money for cancer research, and Anne believes Lo is the perfect person to publicize their cause.
This is an easy assignment for the serious-minded Lo, but wouldn’t you know it, things turn complicated the second she steps aboard the ship (dubbed the Aurora Borealis) thanks to an unexpected run-in with ex-boyfriend Ben (David Ajala), who’s there photographing the event and has been trying, to no avail, to touch base with Lo.
As she enjoys her champagne welcome, Lo is introduced to chief steward Karla (Pippa Bennett-Warner), who’s never to factor into the proceedings again, as well as fellow guests Dr. Mehta (Art Malik), who’s caring for Anne, and Adam (Daniel Ings), a brash Richie Rich who teaches her the ins and outs of “yachtiquette.” Shortly thereafter, she has an uncomfortable chat with famous performance artist Dame Heidi (Hannah Waddingham) and her husband Thomas (David Morrissey), who are little more than haughty and intimidating stick figures.
If the initial people Lo meets on the Aurora Borealis are paper-thin types, they wind up seeming downright three-dimensional compared to the rest of The Woman in 10’s characters, which include bawdy pop star Danny (Paul Kaye), influencer Grace (Kaya Scodelario), and tech giant Lars (Chrostopher Rygh)—the last two proving so superfluous that the film doesn’t even get around to defining who they are and what they do until its midway point.
Of more interest to director Stone is Richard, who graciously thanks his compatriots for participating in this charitable excursion and apologizes for his wife’s absence at dinner due to her declining health. Lo, however, receives a private audience with Anne, during which the dying woman has her look over the speech she’s delivering at the gala that directly follows this voyage—and which reveals her plan to leave her vast estate to the foundation rather than her spouse.
This decision is a screamingly obvious motive for someone (like, um, Richard) to bump off Anne, and later that night, Lo awakens to sounds of a scuffle outside. When she investigates, she spies a bloody handprint on her deck’s glass divider and, moreover, a body plummeting into the ocean.
When she reports this, however, no one believes her, in large part because the cabin next door to hers, number 10, is unoccupied. This makes zero sense to Lo, given that she previously, accidentally entered that room and encountered a blonde woman in a hoodie, and cigarette butts from cabin 10’s deck rolled over onto her deck earlier that day. Alas, the gaslighting escalates, with Lo made to feel like a crazy person who’s imagined the entire thing—maybe due, as Dr. Mehta theorizes, to the post-traumatic stress she’s suffering from courtesy of witnessing a drowning on her prior assignment.
Anne praises Lo for “giving a voice to the voiceless” and in The Woman in Cabin 10, she tries to live up to that reputation, snooping around the ship in search of clues which will verify that someone was in cabin 10. Her sleuthing, alas, is as tepid as the material’s list of suspects is short, considering that virtually everyone involved is too ill-defined to be the culprit—not to mention that none of them have a reason to commit murder.
Knightley’s heroine has a brush with death that’s taken care of in a second, finds vital evidence that then goes missing (making her appear even crazier!), and eventually identifies the mysterious woman as a blonde seen in a Ben photograph from a recent Adam-hosted shindig. She’s also chased, attacked, knocked out, and held captive, none of which generates the suspense Stone’s frantic staging and Benjamin Wallfisch’s insistent score seeks.
There’s merely one logical answer to this nonsense and The Woman in the Cabin 10 knows it, laying its cards on the table a good thirty minutes before its credits roll. The film’s lack of surprise is deflating enough; that it crawls to its climactic conclusion, though, is borderline intolerable. Stuck playing a one-note do-gooder tasked with solving a simplistic case devoid of twists, Knightley is powerless to enliven the dreary action, and that goes double for her castmates, who are left to fend for themselves as nobodies—save for Pearce, who as the imperious Richard does a halfhearted variation on his The Brutalist tyrant
The Woman in Cabin 10 only works if one accepts that the film’s characters are face blind (and brain dead), and perhaps in the spirit of that idea, the finale—a swanky dinner set in a greenhouse lit by hanging lanterns—is shot, bafflingly, in almost total darkness. Not being able to see has rarely been so pleasurable.
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