The Woman in Cabin 10 (Netflix, 2025): Same Yacht, Very Different Story

Netflix had a good premise to work with. A woman alone on a luxury yacht, convinced she witnessed something no one will believe, nowhere to go, no one on her side. The bones of Ruth Ware's novel are strong. What the adaptation does with them is a different conversation.

The Woman in Cabin 10 stars Keira Knightley as Lo Blacklock, a journalist at The Guardian who boards a fundraising yacht trip through the Norwegian fjords and spends the rest of the film trying to convince people that something terrible happened in the cabin next door. Guy Pearce plays Richard Ballmer, Hannah Waddingham plays Heidi, and the supporting cast rounds out the collection of rich, mildly suspicious yacht guests who all seem to know exactly why Lo should calm down.

The movie makes two significant changes from the book right out of the gate, and they pull the story in opposite directions. Lo is no longer a travel writer. She's an investigative journalist at a major newspaper, still raw from watching a witness get drowned in front of her on another story. It's a better setup for the character. It gives her a reason to keep pushing when any reasonable person would have taken the "nobody here but us guests" answer and gone back to bed. The second change is that she doesn't have a boyfriend waiting at home, a mother texting her, a boss trying to reach her. She has Ben, her ex, who is also on the yacht, who cares about her, and who absolutely cannot stop accidentally telling people things she asked him not to tell anyone. When Lo disappears below deck and the rest of the guests start filing off in Norway, the only person who even notices is Ben. If Ben dies, nobody is looking for her. No spoilers on whether Ben dies.

The film follows the book's structure closely enough that if you read part one, very little here will surprise you. She hears the splash. She sees the handprint on the glass, this time clearer and more dramatic than a mascara smear. She reports it, gets dismissed, gets gaslit in increments, finds a hair in the shower drain, loses the hair, gets pushed into the pool with the cover closing over her, loses her jacket and the button she found in the pocket. The evidence problem is the same as the book: every piece of proof is exactly plausible enough to have an innocent explanation, which is the point, but it means the audience has to work to stay with her.

Where the movie opens up the story is in Ann. The book keeps her at a distance. The film gives her more presence and more intention. She invited Lo specifically. She wanted a journalist there. She shows Lo the speech she plans to give at the fundraiser gala, the one announcing she's giving away most of her money. She hides it in a cubby in the library and makes sure Lo knows where it is. This version of Ann is not just a victim of circumstance. She was already setting something in motion. The film gets credit for that.

What it doesn't get credit for is the emotional scaffolding. Lo's backstory, the drowning she witnessed, is shown in fragments and never fully contextualized. You understand intellectually that she is traumatized. You don't feel the weight of it. In the book, the combination of the break-in, the sleep deprivation, the medication, and the drinking all work together to make Lo's credibility genuinely wobble. In the film she seems more like someone who is having a bad week than someone whose mental state has given everyone around her legitimate reason for pause. That matters, because the whole story depends on that doubt.

The cast mostly works. Keira Knightley looks exhausted and stressed in exactly the right way, which is a specific skill. Waddingham is magnetic in the limited screen time she gets. Guy Pearce is efficient at being the kind of dangerous that wears a navy blazer. The problem isn't the performances. It's that the film runs an hour and a half and doesn't quite have enough room for everything it's trying to do.

Our Rating

All three of us landed at half watch, which is the middle bucket on our scale. It's not a bad movie. It moves, it's watchable, and it works fine if you've never read the book. If you have read the book, you'll spend the whole runtime recalibrating for the differences and wondering whether the movie or the novel made the better call on any given choice.

The job change was the right call. The trauma backstory needed more room. Ben's arc lands. The ending is cleaner than the book's. The cast is good. The hour and a half wasn't quite enough.

Book or movie?

Read the book. If you have to choose one, it's the book. The movie is a fine Saturday afternoon watch, but it doesn't replace the claustrophobia of being stuck in Lo's head for three hundred pages on open water with no way out.

If you liked the Netflix version:

• The Woman in the Window (Netflix)
• Rebecca (Netflix, 2020)
• The Girl on the Train (2016)
• Gone Girl (2014)
• Behind Her Eyes (Netflix)

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Missed part one? The book episode is up now. Find us everywhere at linktr.ee/chapteronesceneone.