Based on the 2016 novel by Ruth Ware, smoothly directed by Simon Stone, who also co-wrote the script, cinematically stunning, Netflix’s The Woman In Cabin 10 (2025) is a film thematically sawed in half, as if penned by two entirely different minds, styles, and social politics, glued in the middle by Keira Knightley‘s determined performance, which, through sheer grit and star power, carries the Promethean fire of a promising Hitchcockian thriller (with mistaken identities & much to say on the filthy rich), to a convoluted conclusion reaching soap-operatic heights, and not of the fun kind.
Knightley’s Laura is an investigative journalist, who, having witnessed her source being murdered, decides to allow herself a break writing a fluff piece, following an invitation from a terminally ill philanthropist billionaire, Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and her devoted husband Richard (Guy Pearce), to join them on their impossibly sleek mega-yacht on its way to a fundraising gala in Norway. An odd gallery of super-rich donors and hand-picked entourage is also in attendance, and one of them turns out to be Laura’s ex, a philandering photographer Ben (David Ajala). The atmosphere is repressive and creepily tense, and Knightly is adequately jumpy in her character’s fish-out-of-water attempt to blend in with a wealth-coded crowd, and closely observe the proceedings. Which turn out to be bloody, and apparently only visible to Laura.
Correctly gauging the (inevitable?) epic boredom of immense riches, an aristocratic malaise curated to be minimalist and philanthropic, while bursting at the seams with expected perfidiousness and a very contemporary fear of losing it all, in a heartbeat, with one damning newspaper headline — this could have been a clever mystery, a deceptively hallucinatory yarn on the razor’s edge that all plutocracy rides on, its perverted sense of entitlement and charity, and a sociopathic relationship to all other forms of life on Earth (the regimental, faux-thoughtful upstairs/downstairs dynamics are particularly spot on).
Instead, the film chose to endorse the entire philosophy of the 21st century-mindful noblesse oblige somewhere mid-stream, shifting its gears from seething irony to queasy earnestness, in the end electing to evict the bad apple that corrupted the barrel, with a bang — or rather a slick girl power shoot-out, and leaving be the powers that be.
So to speak.
★★☆☆☆
Author: ©Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 