"Hitchcock Lite" is just right for brisk mystery The Woman In Cabin 10
With sleek, moody direction and an overqualified cast, the mystery achieves its modest ambitions without striving for more.
Photo: Netflix
Certain lines let audiences know exactly what kind of movie they’re watching. “Secure the perimeter?” An action B-movie. “It was always you?” A corny romance. “I’m pretty sure that hard-hitting journalism can actually survive without me for the week?” Thrillers about reporters chasing glamorous human interest stories that suddenly turn dark. Keira Knightley drops this last line within the first five minutes of The Woman In Cabin 10, thus appropriately setting everyone’s expectations for exactly what kind of story they’re watching. After that, the rest of the stylish, yacht-set mystery is free to explore the pleasures of familiar genre schlock done (relatively) well.
While it’s easy to deride the breezy consumability of a straight-to-Netflix movie, in this case, that’s a feature as much as a bug. Based on a novel by Ruth Ware, The Woman In Cabin 10 combines an old-school Agatha Christie mystery like Death On The Nile with the “eat the rich” impulses of Knives Out, with a dash of Jodie Foster’s mid-aughts psychological thriller Flightplan thrown in for good measure. Knightley plays Laura Blacklock, a serious journalist coming off a tough assignment who agrees to take a break with something lighter. She joins the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship owned by a shipping heiress with stage four leukemia (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and her smarmy husband (Guy Pearce), who are looking for favorable press coverage of their new charitable foundation.
A la Knives Out, there are a bunch of eclectic characters in the mix, including both guests and crew. And a la Flightplan, Laura experiences a traumatic event no one onboard believes. She wakes up in the middle of the night to ever so briefly glimpse her neighbor tumbling into the sea. The trouble is, the crew are adamant there was no woman in cabin 10. The passengers are all accounted for, so Laura surely must have been seeing things—perhaps she’s even plagued by PTSD from a recent experience where a source was killed for trying to speak to her. Laura, however, puts her dogged journalistic impulses to work and sets about uncovering the truth.
The best and worst thing about The Woman In Cabin 10 is its supremely overqualified cast. At just 92 minutes, the film has been cut down to the bone. Hannah Waddingham, Kaya Scodelario, and David Morrissey only get about half a scene each to establish their various obnoxious rich-person personas. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is wasted as Laura’s supportive editor. And comedian Paul Kaye plays a sort of Steven Tyler/Mick Jagger rocker type who literally walks out of the movie in the middle, as if he got another job halfway through the shoot.
