‘The Woman in Cabin 10’ Review – Clichéd Maritime Mystery Takes On Water
Given what The Woman in Cabin 10 is about and where it’s set, it’s hard not to feel like it misses some open goals. A movie like this should be sillier, I feel. Probably camper, too. Certainly more glamorous. A 90-minute exercise in maritime gaslighting adapted from the 2016 Ruth Ware novel, it’s a scathing indictment of pompous rich people that doesn’t even have the decency to dress them well. Rarely has such an all-star cast seemed so determinedly drab.
This vibe permeates the whole thing, an adaptation by Simon Stone for Netflix, co-written with Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, that gets soggy way before anyone is tossed overboard. All the edges have been planed away to make the most anodyne movie possible; it’s glossy, not textured, in terms of both how it looks and who’s in it. The performances – from real big-name performers, in a lot of instances – are capable enough to distract you from the fact that they’re being phoned in. Any late danger feels like an overdue reward for having spent most of the 90-minute runtime bobbing in place.
It’s difficult to write about a movie like this, too, since it isn’t bad enough to be annoying or good enough to be interesting. Keira Knightley (Black Doves) plays Lo Blackwood, a London-based investigative journalist still smarting from the death of a woman who had agreed to speak with her as part of an exposé on NGO embezzlement. That makes her a prime candidate for a classic game of “did the crazy woman imagine it?”, a favourite of thrillers since time immemorial, only this time it’s being played in the claustrophobic confines of a luxury yacht owned by super-wealthy businessman Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce, Without Remorse).
Lo has been invited on the maiden voyage of the Aurora Borealis to do a story on the cancer foundation that Bullmer is establishing in the name of his wife, Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli, Paradise), a shipping heiress with stage four leukaemia. The journey is a three-day cruise attended by the board of the shipping company and some other moneyed eccentrics, culminating in a fundraising gala in Norway. Lo’s editor, Rowan (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Surface, who shows up for about 30 seconds and then disappears from the movie like she was never in it to begin with), thinks the assignment will be a cushy job that allows for a bit of R&R, but it turns out, predictably, to be anything but.
Casting someone like Mbatha-Raw in such a nothing part feels symptomatic of the larger problem The Woman in Cabin 10 has, which is mistaking great actors for compelling characters. Everyone who boards the yacht is identifiable almost exclusively by whatever specific bundle of cliches their respective actor has been asked to play up. Lo’s ex-lover and colleague Ben Morgan (David Ajala, Nightflyers) is steadfastly supportive, and a bit flirty; Dame Heidi Heatherley (Hannah Waddingham, Sex Education) is snooty about Lo’s jeans; the tech giant, Lars (Christopher Rygh, Vikings: Valhalla), is dragging an influencer (Kaya Scodelario, The Gentlemen) around to pass as his girlfriend because he’s all wealth and no charm. You get the idea. The only real stand-out at a glance is Paul Kaye (Missing You) playing an ex-junkie musician who staggers aboard like Captain Jack Sparrow and later regales the passengers with a song in a scene eerily similar to the staff training day episode of The Office.
Almost immediately, after learning from Anne that it was she who invited her aboard, Lo begins to feel something’s amiss and witnesses what she believes is a crime, or at least an accident. You’d expect a kind of Death on the Nile-style waterborne whodunit where everyone’s a viable suspect, but it doesn’t play out like that since everyone is so uniformly adamant about gaslighting Lo that it’s immediately obvious she’s right and multiple people are involved in a cover-up. Robbing the audience of the joy of trying to figure things out kind of defeats the purpose of this premise, especially since there’s never any believable ambiguity around Lo’s headspace. Like casting great actors to play thin characters who generally don’t have anything to do except discredit Lo despite the abundance of evidence in her favour, it’s missing the point of the premise entirely.
Since Keira Knightley is a proper actor, freed from the confines of a period movie love interest, she does a decent job of selling the whole affair. But who is she selling it to? Everyone who has ever seen a mystery knows precisely where this one is heading, and there are no real surprises on the way. The Woman in Cabin 10 feels so bleached of colour and character that it isn’t even striking on the facile level that performatively rich people often can be, especially in stories with more class-conscious teeth. Even the yacht setting feels disappointingly underused, with nothing really made of the tight quarters, the vastness of the surrounding ocean, or even the gauche luxury of a rich dude’s big boat.
This isn’t a cruise worth taking. But at the very least, it’s one you’ll promptly forget having been on if you manage to stumble aboard.
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