WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS
The ending of The Woman in Cabin 10 has the curious distinction of being both too silly and ridiculous to be believed but also nowhere near silly and ridiculous enough to not qualify as utterly predictable. This strange middle-ground feels just right for Netflix’s Simon Stone-directed adaptation of the 2016 Ruth Ware novel, since the whole thing is not quite bad enough to be funny and nowhere near good enough to be interesting.
The plot follows Lo Blacklock, an intrepid investigative journalist still a little shaky from being partially responsible for a woman’s death, who is invited on the maiden voyage of a wealthy businessman’s luxury yacht to raise awareness for a cancer foundation being set up in the name of his dying wife, Anne. The gig’s intended to be a laidback bit of R&R, but while hiding from her ex, Ben, a photojournalist who also happens to be aboard, Lo encounters an enigmatic blonde woman in Cabin 10 whom she later sees being tossed overboard. When she reports what she saw, however, she’s told that Cabin 10 was empty, and according to the manifest, none of the passengers are missing.
Yep, we’re once again doing the whole “is the woman crazy?” routine. Fun! There’s no real sense of mystery about this, though, since Lo is otherwise depicted as being totally mentally sound, and the cover-up is so obvious that there’s never really ambiguity about who’s at fault. Needless to say, it’s the rich owner of the yacht and Anne’s husband, Richard Bullmer. There’s a little bit more to it than that, though, so let’s break it down.
Wife Swap
Immediately after witnessing the supposed incident, Lo teams up with Ben to go through some of his own photos, which show the woman she saw – but was told she didn’t see – attending a party earlier that year. Richard’s wife, Anne, who had told Lo just the previous evening that she was the reason she was invited aboard in the first place, is suspiciously tight-lipped the next day. This is blamed on her illness but, not to be too cavalier about things, she was still dying the previous evening.
Part of the reason why The Woman in Cabin 10 doesn’t really work as a gaslighting mystery is that the evidence to support Lo’s position is pretty copious. She doesn’t act mad in any other way. There’s blonde hair in the bathroom sink plug of Cabin 10, which doesn’t make sense if it was supposedly unoccupied during its maiden voyage. She recognises the woman in Ben’s photo. Everyone’s being really suspicious. And so on, and so forth. After a steamy message written on a shower, and Lo being pushed in a pool and almost drowning, there’s precisely no mystery around whether or not she may be imagining things.
So, we know something’s up. What we probably didn’t quite guess is that Richard himself threw his own wife overboard, and that the woman who has been impersonating her since then is a random woman named Carrie whom Richard found using facial recognition software and paid off to pretend to be his dying wife.
Richard’s Plan
If you’re wondering why an extremely wealthy and self-centred man would do such a thing, there’s an easy answer – more money. In the event of her demise, Anne was planning to give all of her wealth – she’s a shipping heiress – to charity, and Richard wanted to pocket it all for himself. For that, though, he needed Anne to sign her cancer foundation over to him, and for that, he needed a shaven-headed Carrie to impersonate her.
It’s probably not intended as such, but it’s a fairly effective commentary on how facile and oblivious wealthy people are that nobody notices Anne is a completely different person. Carrie is just kind of trapped in an impossible situation, someone who figured that she’d stand to financially benefit from a bit of deception and then ended up being a witness to a murder. Lo rightly points out that she’ll be in considerable danger once the scam is complete, since Richard clearly isn’t above killing people – even his own wife! – to get what he wants.
This makes Carrie the responsibility of Lo for the time being, but Lo herself is in plenty of danger…
The Great Escape
As the clock ticks down until the boat docks and Richard is able to complete his plan, Lo goes out of her way to acquire evidence against him, but this also makes her the target of Richard’s pet doctor, Robert Mehta, who chases down Lo with a syringe. Luckily, Ben stayed aboard and is on-hand to heroically intervene, but he does end up with the syringe in his neck.
In a hilariously slapstick way, Ben dies on top of Robert, giving Lo time to get away. With no other options, she jumps overboard and swims to shore. I just want to point out here that this is off the coast of Norway, so if Lo didn’t die of shock immediately on impact, she would have surely lost all of her limbs to frostbite in short order. None of this happens, of course, because Lo somehow finds shelter and starts a fire with seemingly no ill effects at all. The movie actively draws attention to the impossibility of this in dialogue, with Robert telling Richard that there’s simply no way she survived.
But here we are. It’s time for Laura to save the day.
The Truth Is Out
With evidence in hand, Lo jumps on stage during the gala and announces that she wants Anne’s story to be told properly, in her own words, via the original version of her speech that she found in Richard’s study, which reiterates her desire to give her fortune to charity. Carrie, who is hilariously still posing as Anne, goes back and forth with Lo, backing up her claims like some sort of deranged panto.
Richard immediately falls to pieces and rejects fake Anne’s claims by revealing that she’s not really Anne, which only opens him up to more awkward questions, since if that’s the case, where is the real Anne? Richard’s solution to this is to grab Carrie and hold her at knifepoint, which obviously sways the crowd over to Lo’s side.
With the help of Richard’s own security guard and a bit of timely intervention from Lo, Carrie is saved, and Richard is killed, having fallen into the water with a bullet wound and a bonk on the head. The next thing we know, Laura is back in the office, having written an article about her experiences aboard the Aurora Borealis. The article, which includes a tribute to Ben, ties up a few loose ends, revealing that Richard’s co-conspirators were caught and charged, and Anne’s money ended up being donated to cancer research after all.