The Woman in Cabin 10

Looking for an easy assignment after a traumatic one, Guardian journalist Laura Blacklock (Keira Knightley), “Lo” for short, jumps at the chance to hitch a ride aboard billionaire Richard Bullmer’s (Guy Pearce) superyacht to interview his terminally ill wife Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli) about what she intends as a posthumous foundation. It doesn’t take long for things to go wrong, however, and not just because Lo’s ex-boyfriend Ben (David Ajala) is also aboard. No, on her first night she witnesses a person thrown overboard, believing it to be the young woman she briefly met earlier, the one in Cabin 10. After alerting the crew, however, they conduct a search and explain that not only are all passengers and crew accounted for, but Cabin 10 had no occupant in the first place. Given not just the situation but the setting, “The Woman in Cabin 10” seems set up for a stylish murder mystery in which Lo turns sleuth to interview a gallery of intriguing suspects from a rock star (Paul Kaye) to a gallerist (a gloriously icy Hannah Waddingham) to Buller himself. Knightley is certainly game for such a mystery, anyway. When Lo is told everything checks out, time to keep going, chop-chop, director Simon Stone opts for a comic long shot as Knightley’s face quizzically droops, conveying, “Like, wait, what?”

But that mystery never truly materializes. It’s not just that the secret is given away earlier than you might expect, but that “The Woman in Cabin 10” never makes any real attempt to cover the fact that Bullmer is up to no good, underscored in Pearce’s supercilious performance, slurping up orange juice at the breakfast buffet like Shooter McGavin eats pieces of shit for breakfast. Stone, who co-wrote the script with two others, see this less as a mystery than a nightmare, kind of “Gaslight” on a superyacht in which a middle-class journalist slips into psychosis as the rich and famous continually tell her not to believe her lying eyes. Stone, though, doesn’t just see “The Woman in Cabin 10” as a nightmare but, crucially, as trash; it’s set almost entirely on a boat, but like Lt. Frank Drebin, the movie itself is swimming in raw sewage. Stone embodies the unrepentant shamelessness of the rich by throwing all sense of shame to the wind, evoking the haughty belittling of Lo in the over-the-top comical tones, essentially rendering the superyacht as nothing less than an opulent apparatus for covering up a crime, and amplifying Lo’s nigh hallucinatory state through all manner of wide-angle lenses. Indeed, even if many frames remained marred by that artificial Netflix sheen, especially the interiors, Stone’s shot-making is better than you might suspect. One image right after Lo’s concerns have been blithely written off shows her standing at the edge of the yacht, the wide angle disappearing the boat altogether, making it seem for all the world that she has been set adrift with the truth.