The Woman in Cabin 10 Review
Director: Simon Stone
Date Created: 2025-10-10 19:02
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The Woman in Cabin 10 Review: Directed by Simon Stone, the Netflix film features Keira Knightley playing the role of Laura Blacklock, an adventurous journalist with information on trips, boarding an upper-class cruise ship on professional work, but getting stranded among secrets, half-truths, and possible murder. The movie also stars Guy Pearce, Hannah Waddingham, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Morrissey, and Kaya Scodelario, each playing passengers with hidden motives. The movie is adapted from Ruth Ware’s 2016 novel and runs approximately 92 minutes, giving enough time for the mystery to be built, but unfortunately, not enough time to make the mystery credible as well as effective.
The Woman in Cabin 10 Review
The Woman in Cabin 10 film tries to blend classic Agatha Christie-style suspense with modern cinematic polish. That sounds good enough: an intimate setting, all scepticism toward the protagonist, and a disappearance that seems to have pulled off the ultimate crime card. The reality of watching through was anything but exhilarating, though. The movie was never able to convincingly realise the tension or the emotional investment this type of story demands. In the stead of an expertly created mystery, what is provided is an over-frank drama trying to pretend to be much more intelligent than the movie itself is.
The film begins with Laura boarding the decadent yacht, and the documents she’s been given to write on during the maiden voyage of the ship. Off to a promising beginning, a journalist amidst the wealthy, snobbish passengers, one never knowing what the next will bring. The excitement begins when she glimpses one woman over the side, but the excitement’s over almost before it’s even begun.
As Laura tries to convince others of what she saw, everyone around her insists there was never a woman in Cabin 10. Even the evidence she is confident she possesses, a bloodied handprint, a creepy photograph, missing guest list is gone. It’s a setup that has been done too many times before, but the problem here is that Netflix’s The Woman in Cabin 10 doesn’t add any fresh perspective. The suspense feels mechanical, and the twists come exactly when you expect them to.
Keira Knightley does her best to elevate the film. She does good justice to the paranoia as well as the helplessness of Laura. There are times when her eyes speak the terror of the trapfall from the type of situation where everyone around you is making you look crazy. Guy Pearce, playing the obese and suspicious Richard Bullmer, also fits perfectly into his role — calm, cold, and clearly hiding something.
But the fault is not the actors; the fault is the scripts. The Netflix movie The Woman in Cabin 10 never makes its character or catches the audience by surprise. They are one-dimensional all the way around. The cameo cast, however, scattered with great names such as Hannah Waddingham and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, never really has any impact. They are whipped up by the script to literally do nothing but stand around and be an enigma.
For built built-tension thriller, The Women in Cabin 10 is surprisingly the least thrilling. The tension never materialises. The pace is off, either slowing the movie through unwarranted small talk before racing the reader over key plot points. The big plot point that the mysterious lady is under an assumed name had to be a twist, but it was only half the time. The predictability makes the entire second half redundant.
Worse, the investigation feels lazy. Laura’s revelations, like her discovery of hair in the sink or linking evidence by way of gratuitous photos, come too conveniently. It’s as if the film doesn’t want her to think too hard, and that takes away the fun for the audience as well. A good mystery should keep you on the edge, but this one just walks you to the answer.
One thing that cannot be denied is how beautiful The Woman in Cabin 10 movie looks. The cinematography does the open sea justice as well as the secluded rooms on the yacht. The setting does the story’s feeling of isolation as well as danger that, done well, would have been the movie’s greatest point of emphasis. The screenplay doesn’t take advantage.
Even during the scenes where the action is most frenzied, like how Laura dives overboard, or when the secret that Richard is hiding is revealed, I never felt invested. There’s no feeling attached to any member of the cast, so the tension never quite becomes real. It’s as if you’re reading someone else’s work to solve the mystery.
The final act of Netflix’s The Woman in Cabin 10 tries to tie everything together with a dramatic confrontation, and justice is ultimately delivered. By that point, however, it’s too late to worry. The conclusion comes too fast and too neat, as if the movie had attempted to conclude itself before collapsing over itself.
Netflix The Woman in Cabin 10 Review: Summing Up
All in all, The Woman in Cabin 10 for me had a good lead actress, good location, and a promising premise; that could have been one of the better thrillers for this year. But what we have was just another forgettable addition to their mystery collection. if you are in the mood for something casual and uncomplicated, you will enjoy this for a one-time watch. If you are looking for a mystery that will challenge you or conjecture, this is not the one.
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