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On a cursed journey aboard a stunning luxury yacht, Knightley’s wayward journalist gets gaslit, gets scared, and gets even — but this whodunnit otherwise feels terribly frigid.
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Over the course of the past decade, novelist Ruth Ware has churned out a new thriller just about every year, twisty little gems that smack of Agatha Christie and give plenty of space for complicated, interesting female characters at their heart. Of course, Ware’s bestselling novels also feel ready-made for the big and small screen, so it’s only surprising that we’re just now getting the first adaptation of a Ware hit.
First out of the gate: “The Woman in Cabin 10,” starring Keira Knightley and based on Ware’s 2016 novel of the same name. While the Netflix movie will arrive later this fall, other Ware adaptations are in the offing: New Line Cinema has the rights to “In a Dark, Dark Wood,” while Entertainment One has TV rights to “The Lying Game” and Universal International Studios is developing “Zero Days” for TV as well.
But “The Woman in Cabin 10” is a fine pick for Ware’s first adaptation, and one that gets to the heart of what makes her stories so compulsively readable (and, as surely Netflix brass are betting and hoping, compulsively watchable too). Plus: rich crazy people actin’ badly on a yacht, always a bankable sub-genre.
Per Netflix, the film‘s official synopsis is as such: “While on board a luxury yacht for a travel assignment, a journalist — Lo (played by Knightley) — witnesses a passenger thrown overboard late at night, only to be told that it didn’t happen, as all passengers and crew are accounted for. Despite no one believing her, she continues to look for answers, putting her own life in danger.”
Added Ware in her own statement, “At its heart, the film is about a woman who experiences something wrong, reports it truthfully, and isn’t taken seriously because of who she is. Too many people know what that feels like and I think we want vindication for ourselves as much as Lo.”
The first trailer provides plenty of evidence of Lo’s terror: she sees a body go overboard, and oops, is promptly told by just about everyone around her that she’s nuts. Don’t say that to a woman. Don’t say that to a woman journalist.
Guy Pearce, David Ajala, Hannah Waddingham, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw also star, along with Art Malik, Kaya Scodelario, David Morrissey, Daniel Ings, Gitte Witt, Christopher Rygh, Pippa Bennett-Warner, John MacMillan, Paul Kaye, Amanda Collin, and Lisa Loven Kongsli. Simon Stone directs from a script he cowrote with Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse.
The film will start streaming on Netflix on Friday, October 10. Watch the first trailer for “The Woman in Cabin 10” below.