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every week, Netflix drops a list of the top 10 movies and TV shows dominating the platform. Last week, the top film on the platform was original thriller The Woman in Cabin 10, starring Keira Knightley as a journalist who witnesses a woman being thrown overboard on a luxury yacht.
In the film based on Ruth Weir’s novel, Knightley’s character, Lou, is invited aboard a megayacht to write a story about a wealthy couple, Richard and Anne Bulmer (Guy Pearce and Lisa Lovin Kongsley), and their charitable work. Anne requested Lou’s presence specifically because she admires her work. When Lou meets her, Anne confides in Lou that she plans to donate billions of dollars to charity after her death.
Warning: There are spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read any further.
On the first night of the flight, Lou heard a fight in the next room – cabin 10! There’s a splash, and I realize that someone has gone overboard. She panics and informs the crew because she saw a woman in that very room earlier, but everyone on the ship has been accounted for. She’d been told that no one had ever been in that room, so she figured what she thought she heard was all in her head.
Lo basically becomes the world’s worst guest because she’s supposed to be a fly on the wall during this trip, keeping tabs on the Bullmers and their wealthy guests; However, the entire journey eventually turns into an interrogation as she tries to get to the bottom of what she saw. “You’re a little disappointed, Lou. She’s kind of toxic,” one of the guests, Grace, tells her after someone tries to kill Lou and no one believes her.
Both Lo and the audience are on the same side in this case. We’re not supposed to think they’re make-believe things, and we want Lo to find out exactly what happened because she’s an investigative journalist; This is what you do. A little more than halfway through the film, we learn that the woman thrown into the sea is Anne.
Richard killed her, and the woman Lou saw in cabin 10 was a doppelgänger of the Anne he had hired, named Carrie (played by a different actor named Getty Witt), so that she could impersonate Anne and eventually sign over her life savings to Richard in her will. For the rest of the trip, any time Anne graces guests with her presence, she is actually Carrie in disguise, as Richard keeps her alive long enough so she can sign over her fortune to him.
It was explained that Richard used facial recognition technology to scan social media so he could hire a woman who looked like… exactly Like Anne. Every time Anne appears on screen after her first meeting with Lou, it is actually Carrie who has shaved her head and applied sick makeup to resemble sick Anne. But I’m supposed to believe that this group assembled on the ship, a group of some of Anne’s close friends–don’t you realize it’s not actually Anne? They may look similar, but their sound and structure are different, and we don’t question that? Are these the same people who don’t realize that Clark Kent is also Superman? I haven’t read the book, and it might have gone into more detail about the sneaky identity theft required for this whole ruse to work, but once the big twist was revealed, I was waiting for the moment when someone in the movie finally realized it. He never came.
Expertly paced, the film is a 90-minute thrill ride that’s easy to digest and enjoyable, assuming those details don’t bother you. (You’ll probably find other aspects of the film to irritate you.) Although it’s full of drama, there are moments of lightness thanks to actors like Hannah Waddingham, Paul Kaye, and Kaya Scodelario, who round out the film as obnoxious, wealthy guests on the yacht, adding a bit of Knives Out flair to the ensemble. The film may have its faults, but it will serve as a placeholder while we wait for a new season of Knightley’s great crime thriller. Black pigeons.