It’s debatable how much the term “gaslighting” can be applied to the Netflix thriller The Woman in Cabin 10. On a scale from a note-perfect summoning of the 1944 film Gaslight (which involves a scheming man manipulating his new wife into thinking she’s crazy) to just using the word to describe garden-variety lying, it falls somewhere in the middle. But it’s clearly intended to recall classics like Gaslight and more conspiracy-minded descendants — mysteries like Flightplan or Breakdown, where the search for a missing person is complicated by others insisting the person was never there to begin with. On this level, The Woman in Cabin 10 is a sloppy belly-flop into the drink.
The movie also appropriates the eat-the-rich sentiment that’s become obligatory in so many recent thrillers, albeit in a politely British way. You can tell that journalist Laura Blacklock (Keira Knightley) isn’t like her supposed upper-class betters because, when she’s invited aboard a yacht (described by a fellow journalist as “fuck-off big”) to cover a gala marking the formation of a rich couple’s cancer research charity, she never wears precisely the right outfit. She arrives on board in jeans, unaware that she’s supposed to remove her boots before boarding. Later, she overdoes it in a glittery dress for dinner.
It’s unclear why Laura, a hard-charging reporter for The Guardian, is covering this puff-piece fodder. The screenplay tries to set her up as feeling haunted by the recent experience of seeing a source killed for talking to her, only to have her decline her editor’s offer of a break. Then she turns around and advocates for accepting this invitation from Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce) and his dying wife Annie (Lisa Loven Kongsli), whose cancer has inspired an ambitious new charity. She seems to want to take a sort of working vacation, which seems like a worst-of-both-worlds proposition. Just minutes in, the movie manages the unusual trick of making Laura seem like she’s behaving out of character before we even know her.
Once aboard the ship, Laura meets a variety of mildly colorful passengers, including influencer Grace (Kaya Scodelario), rock star Danny (Paul Kaye), and curator Heidi (Hannah Waddingham). She’s also blindsided by the presence of her photographer ex, Ben (David Ajala), and, attempting to avoid him, encounters a mysterious, unidentified blonde woman staying in the cabin next to hers. One night, she hears the unmistakable sound of a scuffle, a scream, and a splash, convincing her that her neighbor has fallen (or was pushed) overboard. But everyone else on the boat insists that Cabin 10 was unoccupied, and no one can recall the woman Laura describes.
It’s a fine premise for a locked-boat mystery, recalling the aforementioned thrillers as well as the Hercule Poirot stories recently brought back to cinemas by Kenneth Branagh. (This one is specifically reminiscent of Death on the Nile.) Laura, however, lacks Poirot’s buttoned-up fussbudget confidence. She’s meant to be a hardened reporter, but she rarely conducts her investigation with any strategic chill, instead rampaging around the boat demanding justice while her shipmates increasingly regard her as unstable. Granted, she also becomes convinced that someone is trying to bump her off.
In a thriller like this, however, understandable behavior wouldn’t necessarily be the most entertaining option. Watching Knightley — who works especially when playing tightly coiled characters — metaphorically bang her head against the wall doesn’t make for a particularly engaging mystery. She has few clever ruses or tricks up her journalist’s sleeve. Her behavior raises the uncharitable question of whether maybe she really should share the blame for her source’s death.
If that question was part of the psychological tapestry of The Woman in Cabin 10, the film might really cook. But director Simon Stone never successfully gaslights his audience into thinking Laura might be genuinely unhinged — she just comes across as bad at her job. Nor does Stone dig deep enough into her experiences to make her an effective audience surrogate. With most of the other characters being thin, unconvincing suspects — Scodelario is the only actor who appears to be having any fun, seemingly channeling Cecily Strong’s Gemma from Saturday Night Live — the filmmakers are left to rely on their style. As with so many of these female-preposition-place thrillers adapted from novels (The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window, etc.), that style never touches the neo-Hitchcockian boldness that a director like Brian De Palma might have brought to this material. Greenish hallways and some spiraling shots of stairwells are as much visual vertigo (or Vertigo) as we get.
As a result, even the movie’s appealing quickness — minus the lengthy end credits, it runs about 85 minutes — feels underdeveloped. The whole story hinges on a twist that’s superficially clever on paper but wildly farfetched in practice. Once that hinge has swung, Stone ratchets up the supposed tension with attempted murders, scuffles, chases, and confrontations. Yet as these attempts at excitement emerge, the movie itself flattens out. The closest The Woman in Cabin 10 comes to class commentary is becoming a poorer relation of just about every movie it recalls. To claim otherwise wouldn’t be gaslight-level lying — just standard streaming-thriller overpromising.
The Woman in Cabin 10 premieres on Netflix on Oct. 10.
