Director: Simon Stone
Writers: Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse, Simon Stone
Stars: Keira Knightley, Guy Pearce, Kaya Scodelario
Synopsis: A travel writer stumbles upon a gruesome secret while traveling aboard a luxury cruise ship.
If you were looking to be blown away by a Netflix mystery film with an incredible ensemble cast that isn’t part of the Knives Out franchise, think again. Simon Stone’s The Woman in Cabin 10, an adaptation of Ruth Ware’s novel of the same name, is one of the streamer’s most inept pieces of “content,” which is saying something because you have no idea the time I’ve wasted watching their films thinking they would be worth my time – and they weren’t. In this case, though, the star-studded list of actors attached to this project was too good for me to ignore it entirely. After all, when has Guy Pearce given a bad performance, especially coming off the heels of his Oscar-nominated, career-best turn in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist?
I guess it had to happen eventually, because The Woman in Cabin 10 contains the Australian actor’s first nearly-unwatchable portrayal of Richard Bullmer, who invites a group of people on his private yacht, sailing to a fundraising gala in Norway, where he and his terminally ill wife Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli) are set to launch a charitable foundation for cancer patients. Among the guests is Guardian investigative journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock (Keira Knightley), who convinces her editor (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, one of the many A-listers wasted on unimportant bit parts) that she is the right person to cover this event, despite the trauma she is still recovering from her last assignment.
Everything seems to be smooth sailing (pun intended, of course) as Laura has a chance to meet Anne, who tells her of the speech she will be delivering at the gala, which she is keeping secret from her husband. However, upon the first evening, she encounters a mysterious woman (played by Gitte Witt) in Cabin 10, who is seemingly thrown overboard and killed a few hours later. Since everyone on the ship is accounted for, Richard leads Lo to believe that she is experiencing episodes of post-traumatic stress related to the murder of her last assignment’s source. Lo still feels something is wrong, and is quickly targeted by a member of the ship to stop investigating the woman’s whereabouts, and if she was truly thrown overboard, or if this was a figment of her trauma-riddled imagination.
You’re rapidly going to figure out where this is going, and Stone is not a smart enough filmmaker to effectively subvert expectations, à la Rian Johnson (although this new Knives Out film coming out soon, which this critic saw at TIFF, is not very good). He makes the cardinal mistake of thinking that audiences will believe two people – who look nothing alike – look the same. As soon as this occurs, any suspension of disbelief is completely gone, and the rest of the mystery isn’t as interesting as its filmmaker thinks it is. It wouldn’t be this bad if the movie didn’t jump the shark and spell out who the antagonist is and what their motivations are not even halfway through the picture, but this is what it does, leading to a rushed conclusion that never develops anything it introduces beyond its introductory stage.
Lo is riddled with trauma and the guilt of leading a source to her death. That’s it. We get a flashback to show how serious it is, but that’s as far as Stone goes. She had a romantic relationship with photographer Ben Morgan (David Ajala), who is also on the ship, and the two share some remaining feelings, but that’s also it. There’s no desire to make any of them stand out, and no reason for people like Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Ings (who were both incredible in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen series), Hannah Waddingham, Art Malik, and David Morrissey to be in this picture since all of their characters barely have anything to do with the story at hand.
They exist – meaning they’re physically here and passively interact with Lo – but do virtually nothing in this 95-minute “thriller.” Even when “everyone” becomes a suspect, there’s no part where the director will raise suspicion effectively against one or many figures on the ship. Everyone is a suspect, like in any good thriller worthy of Agatha Christie, but none are fleshed out. We instead get shells of characters we’re supposed to care about, as it clumsily reaches a denouement that all of us see a mile away when its pieces are laid out. No suspense, no thrills, no sense of aesthetics, and no fun. It’s a gloomy affair that gets more ridiculous as Stone and his co-writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse create insane leaps in logic that no one with a brain will believe is possible.
Knightley, too, isn’t very good as a trauma-riddled journalist who’s being gaslit at every turn, but it’s not necessarily her fault. Just like it’s not Pearce’s fault that he’s working with one of the year’s worst scripts that even the most outstanding actor on the planet will have difficulty selling. It’s even worse when Lo doesn’t have much agency to begin with, and has even less of it when the movie culminates in its ridiculously inert climax that’s essentially a low-rent, Uwe Boll-directed version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. There’s no subtlety to how the pieces are clumsily revealed in a shoddily captured and edited finale that raises far more questions than answers.
The funniest part of The Woman in Cabin 10 is how Stone abruptly ends the movie, with no real sense of how the protagonist has evolved on this journey. Just a cut to black. Goodbye. Thanks for nothing. It’s honestly a perfect indication of how forgettable and mindlessly bland this tension-less thriller is, and is highly representative of just how worthless most of these Netflix originals are. Wasting such an excellent cast for non-roles is the biggest sin you can commit, but that’s Netflix for you, which will never beat the “fake movies that are money-laundering schemes” allegations. You, however, have a choice to seek out better – more artistically compelling – entertainment. I think I’m going to do the same.
