On a lavish, sparkling yacht gliding through the North Sea — all beautiful people, endless champagne, and the illusion of perfection — something dark begins to stir. Beneath the crystal glasses and gilt interiors, danger seeps in. The Woman in Cabin 10, adapted from Ruth Ware’s international bestseller, transforms this floating paradise into a claustrophobic nightmare, a locked-room thriller where nothing is as it seems.
The Woman in Cabin 10 isn’t just a thriller — it’s a reflection on how women’s voices are too often silenced or doubted. It turns luxury into paranoia and intuition into “instability.” Here is our review.
The story follows Lo Blacklock, played by Keira Knightley, a celebrated journalist still reeling from the tragic death of one of her sources. Hoping to restore her footing while still working on a project for her magazine, she embarks on the maiden voyage of the Aurora Borealis, a boutique cruise ship hosting a select circle of the wealthy and powerful — gathered, ostensibly, to support a foundation for terminally ill patients. But when Lo witnesses a violent incident in the night and becomes convinced that a murder has taken place on deck, her world unravels. No one believes her. The crew insists she imagined it. The guests whisper about her supposed instability — a woman with too much wine, too many pills, too many nerves.
As Lo’s anxiety deepens into terror, the film descends into a suffocating spiral of paranoia, alienation, and gaslighting. Every corridor seems to echo with menace; every reflection hides another secret. The tension recalls the psychological vertigo of Hitchcock (Psycho, Rope) and the existential unease of Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant), where the boundary between perception and reality dissolves until even the viewer starts questioning the things they’ve seen. We descend alongside Lo into her psychological unraveling, experiencing events through her increasingly clouded perspective as doubt, fear, humiliation, and anxiety take hold. A constant sense of claustrophobia pervades the film, with the yacht itself becoming a powerful symbol of entrapment — a place with no escape, where no one seems to understand or believe her, and where there is no clear measure to distinguish reality from imagination.
Beneath its suspenseful surface, The Woman in Cabin 10 delivers a sharp commentary on the dismissal of women’s voices — a timeless and still painfully current theme. Lo’s “intuition” is treated not as insight but as instability, her emotional intelligence reframed as hysteria. The film quietly but powerfully indicates the cultural plague of distrusting women who speak of danger, a recurring theme throughout history, since the prophet Cassandra in the Iliad almost 3000 years ago predicted the fall of Troy. A woman who has keen insight, and trusts her instinct, who tries to reveal the truth rather than going along with the opinions of the masses is labeled paranoid, dramatic, or delusional and witchy rather than perceptive.
While the film sustains tension and atmosphere, it occasionally slips into familiar genre territory. Some plot twists feel overly predictable for a film released in 2025, particularly in a cinematic landscape where audiences have seen numerous stories of protagonists unraveling in isolation — from The Shining to The Passenger, Don’t Worry Darling, The Changeling, The Truman Show, and many more. Its slick, polished visuals and dialogue, though excellently crafted and realized, sometimes work against its memorability, leaning more toward marketability than originality.
Still, even within those well-worn conventions, The Woman in Cabin 10 remains a gripping and elegantly crafted thriller — visually striking, psychologically nuanced, and deeply aware of the cinematic ghosts it channels.
►The Woman in Cabin Number 10 is available on Netflix now
WATCH ON NETFLIX
Review by Leila Magnolia Luciano
