Plot
Recovering from the trauma of witnessing a source's murder, investigative journalist Laura "Lo" Blacklock receives an invitation from terminally ill billionaire Anne Bullmer, who is starting a charitable foundation with her husband Richard. Lo joins the Bullmers and their wealthy guests aboard their luxury superyacht to write about the foundation, sailing to a fundraising gala in Norway.
The first evening at sea, Lo ducks into Cabin 10 to avoid her ex-boyfriend Ben, a photographer working for the Bullmers, and encounters a mysterious blonde woman. After dinner, Anne privately reveals to Lo that she has stopped taking her medication, and gives her a copy of the speech she plans to make at the gala to announce she is donating her fortune. That night, waking to a woman's scream, Lo finds a bloody handprint by Cabin 10 and witnesses someone fall overboard. She alerts the ship, but all passengers are accounted for; no guest is staying in Cabin 10, and the handprint has disappeared.
The voyage continues, and Anne appears to forget her conversation with Lo, blaming her medication. Lo spots the blonde woman in Ben's photographs of a party attended by fellow passenger Adam, who claims not to remember her. At the spa, someone writes "STOP" on Lo's steamy shower door. Adam is nearby but denies writing it, and Lo learns the ship's security cameras are deactivated for privacy. Sneaking into Cabin 10, Lo finds blonde hair in the sink drain and hides the evidence in her own cabin. She confides in Ben, but suspects her room has been searched after finding a button on the floor.
Lo is pushed off the upper deck into the pool and nearly drowns. The hair and button disappear when her coat is laundered, and she notices Anne's doctor, Robert Mehta, is missing a button. The crew are unwilling to answer Lo's questions, and the irritated guests refuse to believe her suspicions. Barricading herself in her room, Lo spots the woman from Cabin 10 in the hall and follows her to the engine room. Begging Lo to drop her investigation, the woman knocks her unconscious and hides her in a storage room.
Lo realizes that Richard knew he was being disinherited and arranged for a lookalike to assume Anne's identity. Carrie, the woman from Cabin 10, confesses that Richard hired her, shaving her head to impersonate Anne in order to sign over her fortune to him. After Lo met the real Anne on the first night, Anne discovered Richard kissing Carrie and Richard killed Anne, dumping her body overboard. Carrie is desperate for the money she has been promised to help her family, but Lo warns that Richard will kill her after she signs Anne's revised will.
Carrie overhears Richard order Dr. Mehta to find and kill Lo, and Ben returns to the ship as the other guests disembark in Norway. Cornered by Mehta and the ship's complicit captain, Lo is saved by Ben, who is jabbed with a lethal injection. Lo jumps overboard and swims to shore, while Mehta assures Richard that she could not have survived the freezing waters. Posing as Anne, Carrie reluctantly signs the new will, surprising Anne's legal counsel and drawing suspicion from Anne's bodyguard, Sigrid Nilssen. Richard prepares to have Carrie killed, while Lo explains Anne's murder to Nilssen and offers to prove Richard's guilt.
Lo interrupts Richard in front of the entire gala and, with Carrie's encouragement, reads Anne's speech revealing Richard was to be cut off from her money. In desperation, Richard declares that Carrie is not Anne and takes her hostage at knifepoint, fleeing to the dock. Nilssen retrieves a rifle and wounds Richard in the shoulder, and Lo kills Richard with a nearby crank before he can kill Carrie. Lo publishes her exposé on Richard's crimes, leading Mehta and the captain to be arrested for the murders of Ben and Anne, while Carrie returns home to her daughter.
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , 28% of 64 critics' reviews are positive. [8] Metacritic , which uses a weighted average , assigned the film a score of 41 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. [9]
David Rooney for The Hollywood Reporter writes that the film is "blandly glossy" but says it is a "capably acted adaptation." [10] Courtney Howard of Variety stated "Similar to its book-to-film predecessors The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window, The Woman in Cabin 10 also features a gaslit woman who's forced to solve a mystery on her own after witnessing a suspicious incident. And much like the aforementioned beach-reads-turned-Hollywood-thrillers, director-co-writer Simon Stone's adaptation for Netflix also suffers from major missteps by the mid-point, causing any tension to dissipate long before the already-brief run time is up. Still, the sleek production design, symphonic score and performances from a killer ensemble act as a life preserver, making the shenanigans at sea a little less choppy." [11] Lisa Kennedy of The New York Times added "The thriller The Woman in Cabin 10 — based on the novel by Ruth Ware and directed by Simon Stone — isn't a simple whodunit. There's a great deal afoot once Blacklock, a well-regarded but burned-out reporter, embarks on a feature about an invitation-only cruise to Norway." [12]
