For Agatha Christie Fans: Keira Knightley and Guy Pearce in Netflix’s Most Anticipated Mystery Movie of 2025

“Festim Diabólico” (1948) changed the suspense paradigm. If films of this genre were previously just an escape valve for the tensions of an increasingly unstable world, Alfred Hitchcock’s (1899-1980) classic embodied the purpose of using crime to question conventions, the hypocrisy of people who hate each other but who have to share the same space, the anger at other people’s success. Hitchcock knew how to balance horror and intelligence like few others, defying logic with his situations as absurd as they are revealing, in which evil makes up human nature in an indissoluble way, like a reflection in a mirror. “The Woman in Cabin 10” brings together some of the ideas from the Hitchcockian universe, betting the most valuable chips on a dark character, whose past turns against her. Along with co-writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, Simon Stone adapts British novelist Ruth Ware’s 2016 bestseller, maintaining the aura of isolation and paranoia that becomes more evident on screen.

Laura Blackwood is a woman under siege. An investigative journalist widely known in London, Lo returns from a sabbatical after learning of the cruel execution of a woman who had given her an interview about the fraud scheme at an NGO that helps poor children. She arrives wanting to work, and then her editor, Rowan (from a miserably wasted Gugu Mbatha-Raw) tries to convince her to agree to write a report on corruption in FIFA, but she comes up with a counter-offer. Richard Bullmer and Anne Lyngstad, billionaires whose fortune was consolidated through the manufacture of ships, organized a three-day cruise to Norway in order to raise donations for the cancer foundation that the two want to create. Anne is dying of leukemia, which would give the couple the perfect hook to collect a fortune. Lo was invited to participate, and her intuition tells her that she will get a subject worthy of an award. Long cloth.

Immediately, signs appear that the canoe may have a hole. After a faux pas regarding the yacht’s code of etiquette — the “yatiquette”, according to one of Richard and Anne’s diners —, she sees Ben Morgan, the photographer played by David Ajala, with whom she had a traumatic breakup that she is still trying to forget. The two greet each other in a way that makes it obvious that a relapse would not be such a crazy thing, and Stone uses this trope to create increasingly necessary breaths between one confrontation and another, all these occasions in which Keira Knightley demonstrates total control over her character. The way Knightley opens Lo’s chest of bones, little by little, without fuss, mixing fear and courage is one of the film’s greatest qualities, to the point of defining the course of the story and giving due importance to certain figures that would otherwise be lost in unskillful hands.

When the central mystery of the narrative, linked to cabin 10 of the title, is finally concluded, no one is able to say anything. Lo circulates through all the groups of numerous types, with emphasis on the performance of Guy Pearce as the host, cynical in the right measure. It seems easy to add glamor to a den of arrogant rich people full of ulterior motives, but it’s not.