The Woman In Cabin 10 Makes One Major Change From The Book (And It Doesn't Quite Work)

Don't board any luxury ocean liners if you haven't seen "The Woman in Cabin 10" on Netflix or read Ruth Ware's book of the same name; spoilers, like icebergs, lie ahead!

Things change in the adaptation process all the time, and as someone who loves a good thriller novel and is always excited to see one of my favorites get adapted into a movie or TV show, I'm pretty used to this phenomenon. With that in mind, as I settled in to check out Netflix's original movie "The Woman in Cabin 10," adapted from Ruth Ware's hit 2016 thriller about a journalist who suddenly finds herself in peril aboard a luxury ship, I expected to see some changes and differences. One of the biggest shifts, though, was something I genuinely didn't expect.

Let me back up for a second, though, and talk about the overall conceit of "The Woman in Cabin 10." The film stars Keira Knightley, fresh off her leading role in the debut season of the Netflix series "Black Doves," as said journalist Lauren "Lo" Blacklock, who's invited to cover the maiden voyage of the aforementioned cruise ship alongside a group of elite guests. Brought together by the wealthy Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce) and his wife Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), who is coming to terms with her terminal cancer diagnosis, the group on board the Aurora — including Lo — is happy to explore the pool and spa until tragedy strikes. When Lo hears a struggle and a splash, she's sure that someone went overboard and is also sure it was a mysterious woman she met in the ship's 10th cabin named Carrie (Gitte Witt), only to be told that nobody was ever staying in cabin 10 at all.

So where's the change? It has to do with Lo's status as an unreliable narrator. In the book, Lo experiences a home invasion before leaving for the trip, and in the movie, it's common knowledge that she witnessed a murder in her capacity as a journalist. So why, exactly, does this matter?

The entire narrative of Ruth Ware's book "The Woman in Cabin 10" starts when Lo Blacklock experiences a terrifying home invasion; we never find out who the culprit was or why they targeted Lo, but the importance of this burglary is that it helps define what kind of narrator Lo will be throughout the rest of the book. Not only are the police pretty rude to her during questioning, based on the fact that she claims the home invader stole medication from her bathroom, but it also perfectly establishes Lo's level of paranoia before she even boards the boat. Beyond that, Lo, who narrates the book, freely admits that she drinks quite a bit and does so on and off the ship, which also helps play with her credibility as both a narrator and a character (for the latter, what I mean is that the other characters on The Aurora don't believe her immediately because she comes off like sort of a mess).

While I definitely understand the show's desire to basically place all of its run time aboard the ship, the way that it works around this issue is, ultimately, pretty frustrating. As Lo interacts with guests like Hannah Waddingham's Heidi, Daniel Ings' Adam, and her ex-boyfriend Ben (David Ajala), who just so happens to be on the boat as well, they mention to her that they know she saw a woman killed after interviewing her for an investigative report. We see a couple of dramatic flashbacks of a screaming, unidentified woman in her car as it sinks into a body of water, but besides that, we don't really get a ton of specifics. Sure, this helps Lo seem at least a little bit "paranoid," but it doesn't really make her an unreliable narrator, to be honest.

Here's the thing. I get that the "woman who likes her wine and might not remember things" is an all-too common trope in thriller novels — to the point where it was parodied in the Netflix series "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window" — and it can also skew offensive. Still, we sort of lose the thread of Lo's apparent unreliability in this adaptation of "The Woman in Cabin 10." Without the element of Lo's unnamed medication and her drinking habits, the murder that Lo witnessed doesn't really have any strong narrative impact, which is why this change ultimately doesn't work in the adaptation.

Not only that, but what bearing does Lo's witnessing a murder have on literally anything? Why won't we learn enough about the murder for it to matter? The answer here is that it's a plot device shoved into the narrative that hastily replaces the burglary storyline, but narratively, it's unsatisfying and slippery, giving the audience no real reason to doubt Lo. The fact that other people on board the Aurora are immediately suspicious of her and her belief that someone was shoved off the boat and into the icy sea doesn't really make a ton of sense either. Even if Lo is experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, as they suggest, it doesn't mean that she's an unreliable narrator to either the audience or the characters surrounding her on-screen; it just means she saw something terrible and is still grappling with the after-effects. Lo's character needed a more obvious reason to seem suspicious, and overconsumption of alcohol paired with a recent home invasion works in the book. The change just doesn't work in the film.

To be honest, "The Woman in Cabin 10" is a fun enough adaptation of Ruth Ware's book, but this change drags things down just a bit. Still, "The Woman in Cabin 10" is streaming on Netflix now.

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