The woman in cabin 10 (The Woman in Cabin 10, US/UK, 2025). Address. Simon Stone. Script: Simon Stone, Emma Frost, Anna Waterhouse, Joe Shrapnel (based on the novel by Ruth Ware). Photograph: Ben Davis. Edition: Mark Day, Katie Weiland. List: Keira Knightley, Guy Pearce, David Ajala, Gitte Witt, Art Malik, Hannah Waddingham, Lisa Loven Kongsli. Duration: 92 minutes. Available in: Netflix. Our opinion: regular.

The premise of The woman in cabin 10 installs a false herring: that what we are going to see next is a whodunita closed room intrigue in which a sagacious inspector must discover which of all the suspects is the culprit. But The woman in cabin 10 It's not that, and it's not a good movie either. Not only because fails to sow mystery, it becomes predictable in its narrative development, its staging is mediocre and the performances are quite weak, but because it fails in its conceptionin what it wants to be in the eyes of the viewer.

The real one whodunit Not only does it contain a critical look at the world at the heart of the crime and its motivation - often greed, or spite - but it plans an essential collision between the savageness of the murder and the civility of its resolution. Hence the key role of every investigator, whether detective or some delegate, who acts by giving meaning to what appears as chaos, as the concrete glimpse that we live in an inexplicable world.

But let's go back to The woman in the cabin. In that mistaken idea of ​​presenting himself as a whodunitthe film introduces its central character, not a detective but a journalist from the English newspaper The Guardian, who has just been recognized for a risky report on some Kurdish women and for losing an important informant at the hands of revenge. That flavor of distinction and sensitivity that defines Laura Blacklock (Keira Knightley) clashes almost immediately with her decision to attend a three-day trip on a luxurious Norwegian-flagged yacht where a millionaire woman suffering from cancer celebrates with her husband a meeting of the rich and philanthropists to finance a charitable foundation. We do not know if Laura takes it as a social experiment, as a challenge of coexistence between people she wants to scrutinize, or as a break after the exhausting experience of “investigative” journalism.

Despite doubts (ours, not hers), Laura arrives at the imposing boat, meets the guests - a snobbish businessman and an extravagant gallery owner, an aristocrat, an influencer and a technology entrepreneur, the host's doctor and a rebellious rocker -, her ex-boyfriend Ben (David Ajala), photographer of the voyage, and the host husband, a solvent Guy Pearce who requires no greater art than his presence for the suggestive restlessness that his character exudes.

In addition to the luxury of the facilities, and the sinister efficiency of the crew, what seems to settle in the first scenes is a certain enigma around Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), the millionaire consumed by illness, confined to her cabin, who summons Laura to suggest last-minute changes to her will. On her return to the guest wing, Laura goes into the room next to hers, number 10, to hide from Ben's flirtation with a passenger. There he runs into a blonde woman, ready to get into the shower, to whom he apologizes and leaves. At night he hears noises, he perceives someone falling into the water, but when he tells everyone that it must have been the woman in cabin 10, it turns out that no one was staying there. Laura seems to be talking about a ghost.

The Ruth Ware novel on which the film is based takes that idea from The lady disappears (1938), a film from Alfred Hitchcock's English period of literary origin (the short novel by Ethel Lina White, author of another famous terrifying story like The spiral staircaseadapted to film by Robert Siodmak). In Hitchcock's world, a young woman boards the train that takes her across Europe on the eve of World War II, chats with a nice old woman, and when she wakes up from a nap the woman has disappeared. In fact, the woman seems to have never existed. The madness and fabulation attributed to the dreamer serve Hitchcock to outline the unstable war climate under a spy plot full of irony and humor. On the other hand, for Laura, Her apparent obsession with the missing woman leads to a reckless course - and full of ridiculous "accidents" - to describe a mystery that only she seems to care about.

the movie It is taken so seriously that there is not a trace of humor in The woman in cabin 10and the plausibility does not matter much, as Laura and the other characters become puppets of an absurd plot, full of cliches and capricious resolutionswhich also decides to reveal what was already intuited halfway through the film to lose strength in the drama and interest in any subsequent revelation. What director Simon Stone does (who had shown more expertise in The excavationanother Netflix premiere) is to film the Nordic landscapes like postcards, with crystalline skies and seas, snowy backgrounds, overhead shots of the yacht that crosses the frame, all in a childish and anodyne symmetry. Keira Knightley does what she can with a poorly constructed character, torn between childish and unintelligent attitudes in the hint of danger, and recklessness in a resolution that escapes from the closed room to spectacularly compensate for a meaningless mystery.