Review of The Woman in Cabin 10, directed by Simon Stone

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

When it comes to blogging, or even watching movies and whatnot, I’ve been in such a weird headspace lately. I started a new job after quite a bit of a spell of not having any besides freelance and contract work, and now that I am actually working, I’m not watching as much as I used.

Part of it is fueled by my newfound YouTube addiction, but part of it just is that I can’t stay awake long enough to get everything I want done. I haven’t even been going to the movies lately to see them in-person because I simply am just tired after I get everything else done.

Call this a regular phase of corporate America and adulting, but I want to find a balance and go back more to the things I love. Sometimes life is simply trying to find a balance between the things that keep you alive, providing food, shelter, and warmth, and the things that you actually want to spend your life enjoying.

This blog post is going to come out much later than expected due to the fact I’m very behind with everything lately, but I did watch The Woman in Cabin 10 when it first came out on Netflix. It definitely was trending a lot when it came out, and I remember how it was in the top movie when it released on the platform. I guess everyone was watching it then!

This is also the first time in a while since I’ve seen a movie with Keira Knightley in it, interestingly enough. I did watch a recent show with her in it, but every time I see her in something new-ish I remember how she was such a big star in the 2000s and considered an it girl of sorts. Ever since Pirates of the Caribbean she was set career-wise.

Anyways, let’s get into the review of this movie! I don’t want to ramble too much.

An investigate journalist finds herself invited onto a luxury yacht, then gets tangled up in a potential murder case.

The main character in this movie is Lo Blacklock, a British investigative journalist who randomly receives an invitation from billionaire Anne. Anne is terminally ill, and while Lo is struggling with her own trauma (she saw one of her sources get murdered right in front of her), she accepts Anne’s invitation and comes onto a luxury yacht.

There’s a reason why Lo goes on this as well: she’s going to write about Anne and her husband, as they opened up a new charitable foundation. But when she boards the ship, she spots her ex-boyfriend and photographer Ben on the ship too. She finds her way into cabin 10 in order to get away from him, but then meets a blonde woman in the cabin.

Later, when she goes to dinner, Anne tells her that she’s going to stop taking the medication that’s keeping her alive, and she wants to donate her entire fortune to charity. Things get weirder when that night Lo hears a scream, spots a bloody handprint near cabin 10, and then sees someone fall overboard.

Naturally she panics and sounds the alarm, but when a headcount is done no one is missing. The crew also insists no one has been staying in the cabin, and the handprint that Lo spotted earlier is now gone. Lo knows something is up here though, continues investigating on her own, and is weirded out even more when Anne tells her to forget what she told her earlier at that dinner.

Lo keeps digging and finds the blonde woman in some of Ben’s photographs along with a man named Adam. Adam claims he doesn’t know who she is, but when Lo goes to the spa later, someone writes STOP on the shower door witht he steam. She’s freaked out by that but continues to find more clues, including blonde hair in the sink drain of cabin 10.

She tells Ben about what she’s found, but then realizes someone else has been in her room as well. Someone tries to kill her by pushing her into a pool, but she lives. Earlier, when she learned someone was in her room, she noticed a button, and now she sees that Anne’s doctor is missing a button in his coat. No one believes her though and she feels alone, but then she spots the blonde woman again.

She follows her into the engine room and the woman begs her to stop, then knocks Lo unconscious. Lo figures out after that Anne’s husband, Richard, hired someone to pretend to be Anne. The blonde woman ends up telling her after the engine room incident that Richard hired her to pretend to be Anne and sign over the fortune to her, and Richard killed Anne the first night of the cruise.

The blonde woman, Carrie, really needs the money, but Lo tells her that Richard will kill her too. The woman after this conversation hears Richard put out a hit for Lo, and Lo is cornered by crew. Ben, who came back onto the boat, saves her from a lethal injection and she watches him die. Lo jumps overboard and is presumed dead, and Carrie signs the will—much to the shock of Anne’s actual legal counsel and bodyguard.

Richard then makes plans to kill Carrie, but Lo finds the bodyguard first, having come back onto the scene, and tells him about what happened. It’s at the fundraising gala, in front of everyone, that she exposes Richard and reads a speech from Anne. He takes Carrie hostage, but Anne’s bodyguard shoots Richard and Lo kills him. She then publishes an entire piece on what happened, and Carrie goes back home to her family.

Overall Thoughts

For some context: I had no idea going into this movie that it was based off of a novel, nor had I ever read the novel before. I also didn’t really know what this was about beyond the basis Netflix synopsis and the fact that Keira Knightley was in it.

While the whodunnit elements of this movie were interesting to me, I found that overall this movie felt like it was lacking something. It lacks a bit of a soul, and a lot of the characters and their motivations fell flat for me. Ben especially felt like someone who kind of just existed, and I could not connect with the main character for the life of me.

I wanted to, but I just couldn’t. She was a bit of a static character in my eyes, and the ones that were most interesting were Anne and Carrie. I could watch an entire movie centered around them, but instead we got Lo. There was so much potential in Lo’s character too, especially considering her background, but I just kind of found her boring.

I imagine someone out there loves this movie, so if it interests you, give it a chance. Taste is so incredibly subjective, so what I might not like could be your favorite movie. Neither of us are wrong!

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