'The Woman In Cabin 10' review: Keira Knightley is on a boat, take a look at her

Netflix

I know you're just dying to know and I am unbelievably happy to share that there is indeed enough champagne to fill the North Sea! Make some noise! While you're doing stuff, give a polite round of applause for The Woman In Cabin 10, the film adaptation of Ruth Ware's novel of the same name. We follow Laura "Lo" Blacklock (Keira Knightley), a journalist who receives an invite from Anne Lyngstad (Lisa Loven Kongsli), an ultrarich Norwegian, and her husband Richard Bullmer-Lyngstad (Guy Pearce) to board his private yacht for a voyage from England to Norway.

This luxury cruise is for their charitable foundation as she's dealing with terminal leukemia. Naturally, other guests are disgustingly wealthy and/or famous, aside from Lo and Ben Morgan, (David Ajala), a photographer and Lo's ex-boyfriend whose presence is a surprise for her. Murky waters are ahead, however, because Lo ends up seeing a body thrown overboard into the sea from the next-door cabin. A mystery is afoot when no one in the passenger list or crew is missing.

I guess the small bit of good news is that "Cabin 10" isn't a total shipwreck and it's also just nice to see an adaptation of (what seems to be) a frothy novel be a tight 90-minute time killer instead of an overlong series, which appears to be the trend these days. That said, the movie was most likely meant to be a trashy thriller with outrageous yet amusing twists, but it's neither fun enough to be enjoyable trash nor clever enough to be thrilling.

After enduring awkward, nonstop exposition dumps and once we get to the yacht, the film sets everything up pretty well and manages to sell you some intrigue. There's plenty of footage on water that seems like the real deal, and Alice Normington's production design does a wonderful job with making the surroundings look expensive and wasteful whilst offering interesting surfaces, angles and details for the cast to play with and the crew to point the camera at. Assisted by Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh's costume design as well as Jenny Shircore's makeup and hair design, the milieu and appearance are never the problem. This feels like a real place where things can indeed go horribly wrong.

Despite being set up for success, director Simon Stone isn't really able to take the tension, artistry or ideas to the next level. Tonally, Cabin 10 is awfully serious, which gets tedious rather fast because the characters are so superficial and the actors portraying them do not have much to work with. We're expected to be on Lo's side, but her characterisation turns her into a caricature of your classic "hysterical woman" who acts frantically despite her supposedly being a respected, well-spoken journalist. It also doesn't help that the only direction given to Knightley seemed to have been "No matter what, don't stop gasping". Plus, you can't convince us that Lo and Ben have even held hands before, let alone more than that.

Similarly vague are the rich and the powerful. Capable actors like Pearce, Kaya Scodelario (as Grace Phillips) and Hannah Waddingham (as Heidi Heatherley) are giving us nothing, girl, because of it. It's genuinely hard to say what Stone and co. are trying to say about wealth, privilege, class and male ego, which in theory are themes that the story could explore if it had any brains. Spoiler alert: it doesn't.

Stone's visual storytelling doesn't really fare any better as all those lovely sets and beautiful faces are ruined by cinematographer Ben Davis' horrendous lighting—the film's climax is pretty much indecipherable because it's just dark and murky—and equally horrendous colour grading. And every now and then when you're actually able to see something somewhat clearly, the blocking makes zero sense and can even be straight-up amateurish. It's truly baffling how atrocious this film often looks, especially if you've seen the director's previous effort.

The mystery itself isn't honestly all that bad and you can easily see a world where the screenplay by Anna Waterhouse, Joe Shrapnel and Stone—based on "an adaptation" by Emma Frost which itself is, again, based on the aforementioned novel—could've become a joyous ride on the big screen. But sadly that is not the reality we live in, and instead it becomes a big ol' mess after the first 20 minutes and the ending is entirely unexciting. This voyage is the opposite of joyous. A bummer, albeit a short one, is a better way to describe it.

Smileys: Production design

Frowneys: Characterisation, directing, lighting, ending

What body? We don't sea anything.

1.5/5

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