What happens when a reporting gig turns deadly? The Woman in Cabin 10 (2025), directed by Simon Stone and based on the novel by Ruth Ware, follows journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock (Keira Knightley) navigating her new job for the wealthy Anne and Richard Bullmer (Lisa Loven Kongsli and Guy Pearce). Lo reports on the maiden voyage of their yacht, the Aurora Borealis, accompanying the ceremonial establishment of their new cancer foundation. Anne, who is terminally ill with cancer, initially aims to donate a portion of her money to her new foundation, leaving most of her assets to her husband. Yet, reflecting on the cruelty of her past — which remains vague — she decides to change her will to liquidate and donate all assets.
Lo struggles to find her footing alongside the couple’s wealthy friends, until one night, she wakes up to commotion in the neighboring room and sees a woman fall overboard. After Lo alerts the crew, they account for every passenger on the yacht. Lo’s story is deemed a fantasy, and it is now up to her to solve this mystery. Yet, it is here where the plot begins to unravel.
Lo becomes the sole advocate for this missing woman, who everyone asserts does not exist. Between finding suspicious hair in the room’s drain and looking through old photos of previous Bullmer-hosted events, Lo’s mission to find the woman becomes all-consuming. The more she looks, however, the more she is discouraged from trying. The couple’s photographer, Ben, suggests that Lo stop digging because “these people run the world,” pointing to the passengers’ immense privilege.
The Woman in Cabin 10 paints with a broad brush to offer a critique of the world’s elite; however, this critique never sufficiently lands. The clique of heirs, tech moguls, and rock stars aboard the yacht mock Lo for overdressing for dinner, but not to the point of cruelty. Each of the characters has a certain professional demeanor to them, scorning Lo for suggesting any of them would push a woman overboard, but none of them even privately question her evidence among themselves. The passengers’ actions are so strange and contradictory that they limit the plausibility of Lo’s search for the antagonist. The audience questions the passengers’ nonchalance about the potential of a murderer on the boat, but can’t quite understand the point that the director is trying to make. They are privileged, definitely, but it is never completely obvious if they should be disliked for it.
Typically, a good murder mystery will scatter suspicion throughout an entire cast, offering multiple plausible suspects. In this film, since all of the characters are equally callous and lacking a unique motive, it is not that all of them seem like suspects, but rather none of them do. It is clear that each passenger is on the boat to uphold their reputation, only having a vague business connection with the Bullmers, but the movie treats the group as a monolith. None of them are differentiated enough to make them a compelling potential antagonist. It is a failed attempt at an ensemble film that wastes the potential of showcasing a wide range of characters. By the end, the audience is simply left confused as to why a select few friends and crew members end up being “in” on the plot, while others are not.
Even Lo does not make much sense as a character. She suffers from jarring nightmares as a result of the death of a source on an important investigative piece. While this trauma is important to Lo’s character, it is never fully explored, leaving a disconnect between her and the audience. We do not know who the source was, who killed them, or how Lo was responsible for the attack, only that it left a large mark on Lo. The experience is meant to further discredit her judgment as a legitimate murder witness, but without comprehensively understanding how it makes her an unreliable narrator, the audience does not understand why the passengers invalidate her allegations. Lo’s reporting on the yacht was an opportunity from her editor as a reprieve from intense work, but it ended up being just as threatening an experience.
Nonetheless, the film made for a good watch, immersing audiences in Lo’s journey to discover the truth. By suspending your belief for the hour and a half runtime, you could be compelled by the plot twist: the woman thrown overboard was Anne. Lo met the real Anne only once; she was quickly replaced by a body double, Carrie, after Richard killed her, threw her overboard, and paid Carrie to impersonate Anne. Richard’s motive is the will, hoping to have Carrie rewrite it to include him and secure his fortune. As for his strange guests, Richard extorts various friends on the boat to hide the truth of the murder. Oddly enough, not one guest on the yacht voices any suspicion that Anne looks slightly different. Carrie ends up trying to protect Lo by urging her to stop looking into the truth about the missing woman, worrying that Richard may come for her next. In the end, Lo foils Richard’s scheme and returns to her office job in London without a second thought.
Ultimately, the plot wraps up nicely, if you ignore the jumps it takes to get there. If the film had cared to share more information with the audience, building out the world and backgrounds of more characters, then this ending would have felt more triumphant. With little insight into deconstructing Richard’s vengeful plot, the film hands Lo any evidence and leads on a silver platter. She simply stumbles across the body double by accident, is handed photo evidence of Carrie’s identity by her ex, Ben, and is saved by the Bullmers’ head of security before Richard nearly kills her without much effort at all. While the film tries to characterize her as a driven investigator, little of the plot allows this trait to shine. She is routinely a protagonist driven by luck.
Overall, The Woman in Cabin 10 is a film to aimlessly turn on, avoiding any mental gymnastics to understand the plot. While the film lacked many details and failed to establish investment in the characters, its relatively safe storyline, tense tone, and grandiose scenery make it a fine option among the Netflix Top 10.
