The Woman In Cabin 10 Movie Is Missing One Crucial Element Of The Book

Massive, major, cruise ship-sized spoilers for "The Woman in Cabin 10" — both the Netflix film and the book of the same name. Proceed with caution!

I feel like I need to acknowledge, right out of the gate, that I understand that most book adaptations are forced to change their narrative structure so that it translates better to either the big or small screen. This becomes a particular problem when you think about each specific novel's point of view; if we experience the book through the protagonist's eyes in first person, it's nigh impossible to make that work in a movie or a television show. Still, there's one thing about the new Netflix original "The Woman in Cabin 10" that totally went missing in the adaptation process, and it's the voice of the story's heroine, Lauren "Lo" Blacklock. 

Played by Keira Knightley, Lo is an investigative journalist who agrees to take an assignment on the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship called the Aurora courtesy of a wealthy and famous man named Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce) and his wife Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), the source of Richard's wealth who is dying due to complications from cancer and has her will all drawn up. When Lo accidentally goes into cabin 10 on the Aurora, she meets a mysterious woman known only as Carrie (Gitte Witt) in there — and when Lo hears mysterious noises that sound like someone in danger later that night and then hears someone apparently fall overboard, she worries that it's Carrie. Unfortunately, as the ship's staff tells Lo, nobody was ever staying in cabin 10.

This is all to say that "The Woman in Cabin 10" is a pretty boilerplate murder mystery clearly inspired by the work of Agatha Christie, but the adaptation feels a little ... empty. Why? It all comes down to Lo's distinct lack of voice in the film, which potentially could have been solved by something that might sound unusual at first.

Hear me out. Please. I know voice-overs can be really tacky and often are, but I actually think "The Woman in Cabin 10" would have benefited from a voice-over. Not only would it have helped the movie harken back to those aforementioned classic murder mysteries, but it would have helped us get into Lo's head, and if you've read the book, you know it's messy in there. Like many other thriller heroines — to the point where it's sort of a trope, honestly — Lo tells us pretty promptly that she drinks a little too much a decent amount of the time, and after her apartment is invaded and burgled before she boards the Aurora, we also learn that she's on an unspecified medication. 

None of that is me passing judgment, but within Ruth Ware's story, it feels pretty clear that we're supposed to gather that Lo, while bright and well-intentioned, might not be the world's most reliable witness or narrator ... helping us doubt her theory that someone was murdered on the boat and helping the other characters in the story doubt her as well.

Lo keeps drinking once she boards the boat in the novel, and not only does that cloud her judgment and perception, but she's also experiencing a significant mental health crisis after experiencing that jarring home invasion. If Keira Knightley had provided a voiceover as Lo, we would have gotten a much better look at her internal monologue on a literal level, but we also might have understood what she's going through. As it stands, though, Lo, like the boat itself, is a mostly empty vessel.

In an interview with Tudum, Netflix's in-house website, Ruth Ware spoke to her intended message between "The Woman in Cabin 10" (and, frankly, its 2025 sequel "The Woman in Suite 11," which is enjoyable but, in my opinion, hits pretty much all the same beats as its predecessor. "['The Woman in Cabin 10'], at its heart, is about a woman who experiences something wrong, reports it truthfully, and isn't taken seriously because of who she is," Ware said. "Too many people know what that feels like, and I think we want vindication for ourselves as much as Lo." Do we know? I don't know if, after watching "The Woman in Cabin 10," I think all that much about Lo at all!

This certainly isn't Ware's fault, nor is it Keira Knightley's, who does her very best with the meager material she's given. Unfortunately, Lo is an audience stand-in of the most egregious kind, quietly wandering through different spaces of the boat to solve a mystery without ever communicating her thought process, which, again, isn't on Knightley but on the film's director, Simon Stone, and his co-writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse. You can, without question, let "The Woman in Cabin 10" simply wash over you on a rainy day this fall, and you'll probably have a pretty good time, but especially after reading the original book, I just can't help but feel like the story could have been fuller, more deeply explored, and more focused on Lo's inner monologue. The voiceover suggestion sounds silly, but it might have worked, honestly.

"The Woman in Cabin 10" is streaming on Netflix now.