A journalist finds herself invited to the luxurious cruise ship of a wealthy British Lord, with the assignment to document a subsequent fundraiser supporting a terminally ill shipping heiress. A chance encounter with a mysterious woman in an adjacent cabin could be seen as nothing more than innocuous, but when said woman falls overboard one uneventful evening, the investigation that follows reveals the shocking detail that all guests have been accounted for, and no woman in…wait for it…Cabin 10 ever existed.
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One intrepid journalist thinks otherwise. Cue the plot!
It might be easy to determine, or at the very least guess, the ending to “The Woman in Cabin 10,” based on a Ruth Ware novel, with more than several red herrings in place early on to assist audiences in deciding what the outcome might be. In many ways, it’s your classic Whodunit, mixed with a paranoid dash of “Shudder Island” and with Guy Pearce’s Richard Bullmer lurking in the shadows as debonair as ever. Keira Knightley plays our heroine, Laura Blacklock, fresh off crafting a widely-publicized story where the subject met her untimely demise as a result of Blacklock’s reporting; in need of a win, passenger space aboard Bullmer’s yacht soon follows, a vessel loaded with characters plucked from any number of mysteries going back decades, even a former lover, photojournalist Ben (David Ajala), among the fray. It’s Trope City, population Everyone, and in the wake of Rian Johnson’s success with the unexpected franchise that is “Knives Out, “it’s hard not to draw a comparison or two.
Unsurprisingly, Blacklock’s suspicions will soon place her firmly in hot water with her fellow travelers, nor is it any manner of shock when another literally dark figure materializes in a manner to suggest that it’s best Blacklock cease her quest immediately. Could a mid-point climactic encounter answer a question or two? With a half hour remaining, little seems left other than for director Simon Stone to attempt ratcheting the tension up unnecessarily as Blacklock recovers from that same individual trying to take her life. However, Art Malik holds his own as the doctor charged with caring for Bullmer’s wife, Annie (Lisa Loven Kongsli). Does it help to know that Annie’s the one who’s sick? It should.
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Ultimately, this patchwork quilt of tried-and-true plot elements yields little more than a film with hardly a standout element beyond Knightley’s genuinely excellent performance, her own attempt to elevate such a supremely average premise to, at best, a passable one. It would be easy to compare “The Woman in Cabin 10” to those that came before, just as following the flow to the end credits takes similarly little effort, but that might obscure the message. Does one exist? That part’s difficult. [C+]