Netflix’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is Agatha Christie for the age of mindless scrolling. It’s a murder mystery that only works if you’re not really paying attention, and are happy in the fact the characters on screen aren’t really either. It’s also the latest entry in Keira Knightley’s tonal shift from period dramas to stylish thrillers, à la Official Secrets (2019) and Black Doves (2024), the latter also with Netflix.
She suits the genre. That chummy forthrightness – the sense she’ll ask all the right questions and then invite you out for drinks after – works as well for detectives as it did for history’s pioneering women. Yet The Woman in Cabin 10 is the weakest and most disposable of the lot.
Knightley plays Laura “Lo” Blacklock, an investigative journalist at The Guardian whose last assignment, on NGO corruption, left her with a dead informant and a haunted conscience. She’s allergic to leisure, so instead picks up a frothy “human interest story” as a change of pace: a Norwegian heiress with terminal cancer (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and her husband (Guy Pearce) have established a new research foundation that will, conveniently, kick off with a benefit cruise on their private yacht. Lo has been invited to observe and write a few adulatory words.
Parachuted deep into the territory of the one per cent, Lo is smothered by luxury yet commits the apparent faux pas of dressing up for dinner. The awkward shifts into the malevolent when she bumps into a mysterious woman next door (in cabin 10, you might have guessed) and witnesses the distinct signs of foul play: raised voices, blood splatter on the glass, a splash, and then bon voyage to a dead body.
This is, in short, yet another “eat the rich” narrative, like The White Lotus, Blink Twice, Nine Perfect Strangers, Succe– I’ll exhaust us both if I name the rest of them. Ironically, its source material, Ruth Ware’s 2016 novel, is nearly a decade old, belonging more firmly to the era of entertainment about gaslit women hanging out in various locations (...in the Window, …on the Train, etc etc).
So, we’ve been gifted two wrung-out trends in one, as all the yacht’s elite guests (three of them played by Hannah Waddingham, David Morrissey, and Kaya Scodelario) conspire to convince Lo that there was no woman in cabin 10, and she should really get that PTSD looked at when they’re back on shore. She has one possible ally: photographer Ben (David Ajala), who also happens to be her ex. The breakup wasn’t entirely amicable.
You could argue that The Woman in Cabin 10 is a timely film about the threat of journalism from capitalist interests, about disbelieved women and the wealthy’s sense of impunity. Even AI eventually gets a look-in. But it’s not, of course. Any social relevance here is merely a name-checked excuse for nice interiors, nice clothes, cheap thrills, and attractive people, bundled into a tidy hour and a half.
It ends with a plot twist you’ll see coming from about 15 minutes in if you’re actively listening to any of the dialogue. That would unfortunately also mean you hear the clunker they make Gugu Mbatha-Raw, wasted as Lo’s twice-seen colleague, utter in the first scene: “Are we talking about stealing NGO funds from starving children now or your chequered romantic history?” That said, you wouldn’t then be consuming The Woman in Cabin 10 as it was intended – as nothing more than an out-of-focus series of events unfolding from behind your Instagram feed.
Dir: Simon Stone. Starring: Keira Knightley, Guy Pearce, Art Malik, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Ings, Hannah Waddingham. Cert 15, 95 minutes.
‘The Woman in Cabin 10’ is streaming on Netflix
