The Woman in Cabin 10 Review: Keira Knightley Drowns in a Sea of Exquisite Style and Icy Suspicion

The Woman in Cabin 10 Review: Keira Knightley Drowns in a Sea of Exquisite Style and Icy Suspicion

By Rashesh, Founder & Chief Critic, CharotarDaily.com

There are certain stories that feel destined for the silver screen. They possess a potent, almost tangible atmosphere that leaps off the page, begging to be translated into light and shadow. Ruth Ware’s 2016 novel, The Woman in Cabin 10, was one such story—a claustrophobic, gas-lit nightmare set on the deceptively placid waters of the North Sea. For years, cinephiles and mystery lovers have waited, wondering who could possibly capture its unique blend of psychological fragility and high-stakes tension.

The answer, it turns out, is director Joe Wright, re-teaming with his most iconic muse, Keira Knightley. The result is a film that is, at once, a breathtakingly beautiful piece of cinema and a frustratingly polished adaptation. It’s a thriller that meticulously builds its cage out of high-gloss mahogany and polished brass, so stunning to look at that you almost forget you’re trapped inside. As a long-time admirer of both Wright’s visual panache and Knightley’s nervy intensity, I walked into the theatre with sky-high expectations. I walked out wrestling with a complex admiration, convinced I’d seen a masterclass in filmmaking that somehow, almost criminally, misses the raw, bloody heart of its own story.

This is not a simple review. This is a deconstruction.

Direction: Joe Wright’s Gilded Cage

Joe Wright does not make movies; he crafts cinematic ballets. From the breathtaking Dunkirk long-take in Atonement to the theatrical artifice of Anna Karenina, his signature is an almost obsessive-compulsive attention to aesthetic detail and fluid, mesmerizing camera movement. In The Woman in Cabin 10, this signature is both the film’s greatest asset and its most profound flaw.

Wright wisely chooses not to rush into the central mystery. The film’s opening act is a masterwork of establishing our protagonist Lo Blacklock’s (Knightley) fractured psyche. The pre-cruise burglary in her London flat is not the jump-scare affair a lesser director might have chosen. Instead, Wright and his long-time cinematographer Seamus McGarvey orchestrate a single, disorienting Steadicam shot that follows Lo through her apartment. The camera clings to her, mimicking her rising anxiety as she notices a slightly ajar door, a misplaced object. The sound design is muted, focusing on the creak of floorboards and her own ragged breathing. When the intruder finally appears, it’s a chaotic, violent rupture in this carefully controlled atmosphere. The scene doesn’t just tell us Lo is traumatized; it makes the audience feel her violation and subsequent paranoia long before she ever steps foot on the cruise liner, the Aurora Borealis.

However, once aboard the ship, Wright’s aestheticism begins to work against the story’s gritty core. Consider the pivotal scene: Lo hearing the "splash" of what she believes is a body being thrown overboard from the adjoining Cabin 10. In the novel, this moment is stark, auditory, and deeply ambiguous. Wright, ever the visualist, cannot resist dramatizing it. He gives us a fleeting, almost dreamlike shot from Lo's perspective through the balcony partition: a dark shape, a pale arm, and the moonlit spray of water, all rendered in a disturbingly beautiful slow-motion. It’s a gorgeous shot, reminiscent of the fountain scene in Atonement. But in that context, the beauty heightened the tragic romance; here, it aestheticizes a moment of potential brutal violence. It sanitizes the horror, transforming a raw, terrifying event into a piece of morbid art. This becomes a recurring issue. Wright is so in love with the opulence of the ship and the stark beauty of the Norwegian fjords that the grime of the crime feels perpetually out of focus. He’s filming a ghost story in a palace, when the source material was about a murder in a floating prison.

Cinematography: The Art of Drowning

Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography is, without question, utterly magnificent. He brilliantly captures the film’s central visual paradox: the terrifying agoraphobia of the open sea versus the suffocating claustrophobia of the ship's interior. The exterior shots of the Aurora are breathtaking, showing the vessel as a tiny, insignificant speck against the colossal, indifferent granite cliffs and the churning, inky-black water. These shots powerfully establish Lo’s isolation; there is no escape, no one to call, nothing but the cold, unforgiving elements.

Inside the ship, McGarvey’s lens becomes a predator. The hallways are intentionally overlit in some areas and plunged into deep shadow in others, creating a disorienting labyrinth where threats could emerge from any corner. He makes extensive use of reflections—in polished tabletops, mirrored walls, and the ever-present porthole windows. In a standout scene where Lo confronts the ship's head of security, the camera frames them so that we see not only their faces but also their distorted reflections in the glass behind them, visually reinforcing the theme of duplicity and hidden identities. The colour palette is a carefully controlled spectrum of cold blues, sterile whites, and sickly greens, making the occasional splash of crimson—a guest's dress, a smear of blood on a carpet—feel like a violent intrusion. The visual language is so strong, so articulate, that it often communicates Lo’s paranoia more effectively than the script itself.

Screenplay: The Perils of Streamlining

Adapting a novel heavy on internal monologue is a Herculean task, and on paper, hiring a writer like Gillian Flynn (who so expertly adapted her own Gone Girl) seems like a stroke of genius. Flynn’s screenplay for The Woman in Cabin 10 is a lean, propulsive machine. She smartly condenses several of the novel’s red-herring subplots and sharpens the dialogue, giving the ensemble of wealthy, suspicious guests a venomous wit that feels distinctly Flynn-esque. The back-and-forth between Lo and her ex-boyfriend, fellow journalist Ben (played with a reliable charm by Sam Claflin), is given more weight, creating a tangible emotional anchor that the novel sometimes lacked.

But in this surgical streamlining, something vital is lost. The novel’s power comes from being trapped inside Lo’s head, experiencing her mounting anxiety, her self-doubt, her reliance on alcohol, and her professional insecurities in excruciating, first-person detail. The film, by necessity, has to externalize this. It does so through Knightley’s performance and some cleverly placed visual cues, but it can’t fully replicate the book’s slow-burn descent into paranoia. Flynn’s script moves at a clip, hitting the plot beats with ruthless efficiency. As a result, Lo’s investigation occasionally feels less like a desperate, fear-fueled search for the truth and more like a conventional cinematic mystery. The ambiguity of her mental state—is she a reliable witness or an unraveling trauma victim?—is presented, but never explored with the depth the source material afforded. We are watching her panic, rather than panicking with her.

Performances: Knightley, A Symphony of Anxiety

This film rests entirely on Keira Knightley’s slender shoulders, and she carries the weight with a ferocious commitment. This role is tailor-made for her specific brand of intelligent, high-strung fragility. In the early scenes, she is magnificent, capturing the low-grade hum of a woman constantly on edge. A scene where a well-meaning guest grabs her arm unexpectedly causes her to physically recoil with such authentic terror that the entire audience flinches with her. She is a master of conveying a storm of emotions with a simple darting of the eyes or a tremor in her voice.

Her performance is a spiritual successor to her Oscar-nominated work in The Imitation Game, where she also played a brilliant woman constrained and disbelieved by the men around her. However, as Lo becomes more frantic, Knightley occasionally slips into familiar mannerisms—the jutting chin of defiance, the wide-eyed stare of hysteria—that feel less like Lo Blacklock and more like "Keira Knightley Performing Distress." It’s a powerful performance, but one that feels, at times, like a compilation of her greatest hits rather than a wholly original creation.

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, particularly a chillingly ambiguous turn from Matthew Goode as the enigmatic financier who occupied Cabin 9. He oozes a silken menace that makes him the perfect red herring, or perhaps, something more.

Final Verdict

Joe Wright's The Woman in Cabin 10 is a cinematic triumph and an adaptive misstep. It is a stunningly beautiful, impeccably crafted, and superbly acted thriller that prioritizes style over substance, and atmosphere over authentic dread. The film is so immaculately polished that it buffs away the novel's most compelling feature: its grimy, desperate, psychological messiness. Wright has created a Faberge egg of a thriller—exquisite to behold, intricately designed, but ultimately hollow. It is a very, very good film that stops just short of being a great adaptation.

Rating: 3.5 / 5 Stars

Who Should Watch This?

• WATCH IT IF: You are a fan of director Joe Wright’s distinct visual style and appreciate a thriller that values mood and aesthetics as much as plot. If you love a powerhouse central performance and want to see Keira Knightley at the top of her game, this is a must-see.

• SKIP IT IF: You are a die-hard purist of Ruth Ware’s novel and will be frustrated by the changes made for a more cinematic pace. If you prefer your mysteries to be gritty, raw, and unvarnished, the film’s high-gloss sheen might leave you cold.