Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | October 15, 2025
There was a stretch from around 2015 to 2021 whre it felt like every other mystery novel centered on someone (usually a woman) being gaslit by an antagonist (usually a man), and I tore through them. Ruth Ware seemed to release one every year, and there were also Alice Feeney, Greer Hendricks, Paula Hawkins, Catherine Steadman, and B.A. Paris, among others. I must have read a dozen or more over three years before they became so painfully predictable and mundane that I had to stop. At that point, I couldn’t even remember what I’d liked about them in the first place. There is something satisfying about the gaslit woman ultimately uncovering the truth and getting her revenge, but to get there, you have to slog through three-quarters of a novel in which some guy repeatedly tries to convince her she’s crazy.
This kind of story has always existed, of course, but the success of Ruth Ware’s 2015 In a Dark Dark Wood and 2016’s The Woman in Cabin 10 really helped push the genre into the mass-market mainstream. It makes sense that Netflix — the home of Harlan Coben’s bland yet inexplicably popular thrillers — would team up with Ware. After the inevitable success of The Woman in Cabin 10, she has plenty of other novels the streamer can adapt into equally predictable movies with endings that do not justify the journey.
Netflix’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is as basic as they come. And so goddamn boring. Keira Knightley stars as investigative journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock, who accepts an assignment aboard a luxury superyacht hosted by Richard and Anne Bullmer (Guy Pearce and Lisa Loven Kongsli). Anne is dying of stage four leukemia, which isn’t actually a thing, since leukemia isn’t staged, but fine. The point is that Anne is dying and tells Lo she plans to disinherit her husband and donate her entire estate to cancer research.
The next morning, Lo witnesses “someone” from Cabin 10 go overboard, but no one on the yacht believes her because, they claim, no one was staying there. But she saw someone in Cabin 10, she insists! And so begins the gaslighting. It’s clear almost from the start where the story is going and exactly what the twist will be, so watching The Woman in Cabin 10 becomes an agonizing exercise in endurance.
And my god, it’s tedious. It’s essentially an hour-plus of Keira Knightley unraveling an obvious mystery while everyone around her insists she’s lost her mind, that she’s suffering PTSD from a previous case and just needs to calm down and shut up. But she can’t calm down or shut up, because she’s a journalist, damnit, and SHE NEEDS THE TRUTH.
It’s a miserable movie — poorly written, poorly adapted, and acted by a cast that seems half-asleep, probably because they’ve been given so little to work with. It’s dull, lifeless, and completely beneath the talents of everyone involved, including Hannah Waddingham, David Morrissey, Daniel Ings, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Kaya Scodelario, all of whom play characters that should’ve been a red herring but instead feel like director Simon Stone just cobbled together whatever narrative would get the film from start to finish as quickly as possible.
It still isn’t fast enough. It’s only 92 minutes, and I still had to take a break three or four times because the tedium of The Woman in Cabin 10 becomes so suffocating that it feels, at times, like being held hostage by a movie. Save yourself. Don’t bother. Whatever is going on outside your window for the next 90 minutes is better, I promise you, even if the only view you have is a brick wall.
