The Woman In Cabin 10 Review: This Silly Thriller Leaves Its Cast Lost At Sea

Clocking in at a whisker over 90 minutes — nine of which are end credits! — "The Woman in Cabin 10" feels less like a prestige adaptation of a best-selling murder mystery novel and more like an extended pilot episode for a new detective procedural. Overlook the famous faces and the luxurious cruise setting that all but demands you regard this as a contemporary "Death On the Nile," and you'll see that Simon Stone's film would register better as an episode of the kind of British case-of-the-week thriller you might stumble across on PBS. Having not read the 2016 source novel by Ruth Ware, I can only assume that various plot threads have not been translated to the screen, hence the straightforward, extremely hurried plotting that seems desperate to reveal the killer and get the whole thing over with.

Ware's novel was published during the post-"Gone Girl" peak of high-concept, female driven murder mysteries with unreliable narrators, and the failures of Hollywood adaptations of "The Girl on the Train" and "The Woman in the Window" haven't done anything to help her story following in their tracks. Like those adaptations, it's fun, trashy nonsense I will defend up to a point; self-aware about its silliness without ever overplaying its hand, but with little food for thought beyond the brainless, empty-calorie entertainment it provides.

It speeds through the plot beats so fast, in fact, that it never properly allows you to take part in the murder mystery guessing game for yourself, barely developing its characters beyond the one note they're introduced on, so the question of a motive becomes an irrelevance to anybody watching.

Keira Knightley stars as Laura "Lo" Blacklock, a journalist awaiting her next big scoop who decides to take up the offer of a luxury Nordic charity fundraising cruise being organized by billionaire Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce). Less than 10 minutes into the film and we've already set sail, and we're barely making waves by the time Lo is awoken one night and sees a screaming woman thrown into the water from the room next to her. However, not is all as it seems, as cabin 10 was vacant, and nobody on the ship has gone missing. With Lo accused of having a PTSD-induced vision after seeing someone killed on an undercover report several months earlier, the passengers grow increasingly hostile toward her as she tries to interview them and get the truth — and, naturally, she is hunted down for trying to get answers.

Good casting can make up for insubstantial characterization, especially when the characters need to be richly drawn enough for us to put every little wrinkle under the microscope. Failing that, however, director Simon Stone instead relies on smartly deployed typecasting to flesh out his list of suspects, with Pearce following up his "Brutalist" Oscar nomination playing another philanthropist with a far more cynical, sinister side; Hannah Waddingham as an uptight high-class artist; and Paul Kaye as a washed up rockstar who will still joke about drug binges despite being sober for years. It's shorthand filmmaking to ensure he doesn't need to spend too much time developing his characters and what their varying motives could be, which comes at the expense of the mystery itself; for all the time spent on plot machinations, the red herrings and left-field turns can feel a little too obvious from a mile away, so familiar is everything else onscreen.

Lo is the only character fleshed out beyond surface level, and even then, it feels like whatever depth she possessed on the page has been sanded down onscreen. Take her relationship with Ben (David Ajala), a photographer friend who naturally knows more about her than anybody onboard and is responsible for telling the rest of the passengers about the recent tragedy she witnessed that could be informing her apparent hallucination. On the page, the complexity of this pairing — and how much she could trust somebody she thought she knew well — will have engineered dozens of pages of intrigue. Here, the references to her past appear entirely out of left field, only serving the purpose of pushing forward a plot that feels restless. It's not the first thankless role Knightley has ever taken, but there is something dispiriting about one that frequently alludes to a far less certain protagonist; the breakneck pacing never allows her to have the self-doubt that could make for a suitably paranoid thriller.

The main way this feels like an update to the "Death on the Nile" formula, even if the plot deviates considerably, is that it also partially operates as an "eat the rich" satire film. Despite the cruise ship setting, however, the kids-gloves approach it takes to skewering its high-class passengers couldn't be mistaken for "Triangle of Sadness" – which is saying something, considering how toothless that movie was. The only critique of the mega-wealthy comes via the characterization of Guy Pearce's slippery yacht owner, a one-dimensional rich guy whose every move feels like a scheme; the perfect dramatic construct for the Aussie actor to chew scenery as if it weren't an entirely subpar role. It's thanks to game performers like Pearce that the movie feels more entertaining than the sum of its parts suggest while it's on, but even at their best, they aren't adding dimensions to thinly written characters so much as playing within their parameters. It makes for good silly fun in the moment, but feels constructed by design to lack the weight needed to stick with you.

Director Simon Stone has likened the movie to the classic murder mysteries of Alfred Hitchcock and the paranoid early 1970s thrillers of Alan J. Pakula — if only. "The Woman in Cabin 10" falls embarrassingly short of those influences, but you could only label it a failure if you placed it next to them; this is a movie that needs to be approached as the brainless fun it is, not a modernization of a classic genre formula. If, like me in writing this review, you have to think about it for more than a second, it completely falls apart.

"The Woman in Cabin 10" premieres on Netflix on October 10.