“The Woman in Cabin 10,” released on Netflix on Oct. 10, takes retirement cruises to a new low. Adapted from Ruth Ware’s New York Times Best Seller, the thriller centers on the shallow glamor and illusions of a gaggle of the ultrawealthy traveling on a yacht in the name of philanthropy.
The film follows Keira Knightley, starring as Laura Blacklock, a world-renowned but burnt-out investigative journalist who is tired of reporting on the underbelly of society.
When she chooses to report on the fundraising efforts of the Norwegian tycoons Richard and Anne Bullmer (Guy Pearce and Lisa Loren Kongsli), Blacklock hopes that her next story will restore her faith in the world. After all, Anne Bullmer is soon to die from leukemia and leave all of her assets to a cancer research foundation.
But Blacklock’s first night on the ship takes a deadly turn when she awakens to someone being thrown overboard from the cabin next door.
Despite her best efforts to convince the ship’s crew of the murder, they remain unfazed. Crew members tell Blacklock that no one was staying in that cabin and everyone on the ship was accounted for.
Unable to quell her journalistic instincts, Blacklock begins uncovering secrets that refuse to sink.
The superpower of a thriller with an ensemble cast lies in its ability to distract. Ware’s novel captures this undoubtedly, continuously building a plot while subverting her readers’ suspicions as she introduces every cruisegoer as a dynamic, potentially villainous character who stretches far beyond the archetype they are initially assigned.
Meanwhile, the film viewer is granted merely a cursory glance at the two-dimensional outlines of each socialite before director Simon Stone pushes them all to the side in favor of slowly and unsurely progressing the storyline.
This anonymity can be fatal for the thriller, but at least it gives the viewer something to scream about. Somehow, the endless montages of Blacklock aimlessly searching through sink drains and her ex-boyfriend’s camera for clues didn’t shake me to my core. The stakes feel low, Knightley’s panic feels consequently out of place and the audience barely flinches when a character — a near stranger to the viewer — is put in peril.
This is a thriller that horrifies in all the wrong ways. In truth, the only discomfort I felt throughout all 90 minutes of the film was the result of its noncommittal storytelling and general lack of clarity.
Throughout my watch, I frequently found myself marveling at the rarity of this viewing experience. I never thought that I would be able to say I had seen up Knightley’s nose, but there’s a first time for everything.
Perhaps Stone at one point recognized the script’s disrespect toward its greatest conflicts and grasped for a series of downright uncanny, extremely angled shots in order to build tension. Maybe he believed that they would save him. Alas, they did not, and I aspire to never again see a shot that genuinely looks like it was taken in 0.5 mode on an iPhone camera.
Even though “The Woman in Cabin 10” may not send shivers down your spine this spooky season, know that you can at least trust it for a scarily mediocre evening.
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