Casting Keira Knightly turns Lo into a different sort of character than the novel’s unreliable narrator.
Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Netflix
Spoilers follow for The Woman in Cabin 10 film adaptation, which premiered October 10 on Netflix, and the Ruth Ware novel on which it’s based.
Make some room in the ocean, orcas, because The Woman in Cabin 10 is here to aid your assault on yacht culture. The adaptation of Ruth Ware’s same-named 2016 novel takes quite a few liberties with its source material, changing not just the novel’s ending but characters and motivations along the way. Even the size of the Aurora Borealis yacht that contains this locked-room mystery is different! There are a number of credited writers on this thing, including director Simon Stone, and it feels like everyone tried to get an edit in there.
In movie form, The Woman in Cabin 10 is still mostly entertaining; Ware’s core story remains inspired. In both versions, a journalist named Lo is invited on the maiden voyage of a yacht owned by the megarich Richard and Anne Bullmer, the latter of whom has become a recluse as she’s battled cancer. While onboard the Aurora Borealis, Lo becomes convinced that the mysterious woman she met in the cabin next to hers was murdered and thrown overboard. But no one believes her, because everyone on the Aurora Borealis is accounted for. So who was the woman Lo met in cabin 10, and where did she go? And how far will Lo’s yacht-mates go to stop her from digging into the story?
Stone’s version of The Woman in Cabin 10 sticks to the novel’s broad strokes but changes things up majorly in the third act — which is also when it gets fairly complicated and nearly sinks under the weight of all those alterations. It’s still an enjoyable enough time on the high seas, but where The Woman in Cabin 10 in book form was comfortable with ambiguity and troublemaking women, The Woman in Cabin 10 in movie form settles for a bland statement of female solidarity that ties everything up a little too neatly. Let’s discuss the five biggest changes from the book and how they affect the new ending.
Keira Knightley stars in the movie as Lo, in a frantic frowning mode reminiscent of her performance in Netflix’s spy thriller Black Doves. When you cast Knightley, you’re getting her hard-charging, no-bullshit persona, and that approach makes for a completely different Lo.
In Ware’s novel, Lo is stuck in a dead-end travel-magazine job; she just broke up with her boyfriend; she’s veering into alcoholism; and her apartment was burgled while she was in it. Her assignment on the Aurora Borealis, as part of a press-heavy preview voyage, is a major opportunity to move up the ranks at the publication where she’s struggled for a decade. But after Lo spends her first night on the yacht getting trashed, nearly everyone else onboard dismisses her stories about hearing the sound of someone from cabin 10 going overboard as the ravings of a sleep-deprived, paranoid woman. No one else admits to seeing the woman Lo remembers meeting when she first came aboard, insisting that the cabin next to hers was empty all along. The friction between their doubt and Lo understanding that she’s torpedoing her career gives the book great tension — especially once Lo learns that the woman she met is Richard’s mistress, Carrie, who came on the yacht to enjoy a vacation while posing as Anne after the real Anne got off the boat after only one night.
The movie, meanwhile, makes Lo a well-respected investigative journalist suffering from the trauma of watching one of her former sources, a young woman, being purposely drowned in front of her. Lo doesn’t need this gig and takes it on a lark; the film instead builds her anxiety by surrounding her with the Bullmers’ rude, wealthy friends, who replace the novel’s media-world characters. Some of the rich passengers are fun inventions (Hannah Waddingham is having a ball as Heidi, who drinks too much and passes out in a bathtub), but they’re mostly indistinct. Despite their classist dismissal of Knightley’s Lo, we never have reason to doubt her, since the film never establishes a pattern of Lo hallucinating; she’s not drunk, sleep deprived, or otherwise impeded when we see her meet Carrie, and her steadiness during that conversation gives Carrie’s existence an air of certainty. Lo’s unreliable narration makes the novel quite suspenseful, but the movie lacks that level of intensity, especially at the end — but we’ll get to that.
In Ware’s book, Lo meets the mysterious woman in cabin 10 when she knocks on her door three times and asks if she can borrow her tube of Maybelline mascara. That special door knock was Carrie and Richard’s signal to each other, and so Carrie is shocked to find Lo at her door, but she still lets her in, because a mascara emergency is serious.
In the movie, though, there’s no door knock. Knightley’s Lo first encounters Carrie (Gitte Witt) when she just … stumbles through the unlocked door of cabin 10. This is a wild oversight on the part of Richard (Guy Pearce), considering the movie version of Carrie is not his mistress, she’s just a look-alike he brought onboard to impersonate Anne. You hired this woman for a secret job, kept her hidden away in this cabin, and you left the door unlocked? Also, what kind of security does this yacht even have that doors don’t lock on their own? For $8,000 a room, I’m going to need an automatic dead bolt. It’s the flimsiest change from page to screen in The Woman in Cabin 10, and if it was just so they could avoid paying Maybelline royalties — Netflix, we know you can afford it.
In Ware’s book, Anne is an heiress who spends most her time in Norway, while Richard is a minor lord, entrepreneur, and party boy. When Lo learns that Carrie is having an affair with Richard, she’s creeped out by him choosing a woman who looks like a younger, healthier version of Anne.
In the movie, the Bullmers’ relationship is still fraught, but the issues are based more in money than infidelity, and Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli) is far more of a presence. On the first night of the trip, real-Anne meets with Lo for an interview and shares that she’s stopped all cancer treatment and is planning to leave her billions to her cancer-research foundation — not Richard. Later that night is when Lo hears a body going overboard, and flashbacks eventually reveal that Anne walked in on Richard kissing Carrie (again, these unlocked doors!) and realized that he was planning to replace her. Richard and Anne fought, she hit her head during a fall, and he personally threw her overboard — all in front of Carrie, who then knew too much. Lo realizes that Richard had a personal reason to kill Anne, and has further reasons to kill Carrie and her, too, to eliminate the possibility of Carrie going to the police or Lo reporting on Anne’s real plans for her foundation. Giving Anne more of an identity is a pretty solid change on the movie’s part, but movie-Anne is so reasonable and so intent on her desire to give back to the world that, well, it doesn’t track that she would let her husband construct a luxury yacht as a fundraising device. Just give him some stocks or something!
Carrie’s characterization is the adaptation’s biggest change, and its most ill-advised. In the movie, the character feels thin: a random woman living in some unnamed Eastern European country when she gets contacted out of the blue by Richard, who found her using facial-recognition software given to him by one of his crummy friends. Her face is an exact match for Anne’s, so Richard hired her to impersonate Anne during this yacht trip and a visit to a lawyer, during which Richard would have Carrie-as-Anne sign her fortune over to him. Carrie took the gig because she’s a single mom in a war-torn country, and when she arrives on the yacht, she’s helpless. When Richard insists that they kiss and get intimate so that their relationship can seem believable, she has to agree, and when Richard kills Anne in front of her, she becomes an unwilling witness.
All of this helps build out Richard as a particularly evil guy, but it also doesn’t give Carrie much of an arc past “victim,” when in the book, she’s far more self-possessed, selfish in one moment and brave in another. When book-Lo discovers that Richard attacked Anne once she suspected the affair, shoved her unconscious body in a suitcase, and got Carrie to throw it overboard, she’s shocked by the other woman’s complicity, but Carrie processes it all as part of Richard’s (convoluted) plan to eventually go public with their relationship. Book-Carrie believing Richard’s insistence that Anne would somehow disembark from the yacht while they’re in the middle of the ocean is meant to signal the impact of his love-bombing Carrie, when in reality, he probably planned to kill Anne and swap in Carrie as her replacement all along. (Kill the wife, marry the girlfriend; a tale as old as time.) Book-Carrie initially blames Lo for disrupting her and Richard’s plan, and willingly holds her hostage at Richard’s behest. Only after Lo points out that Carrie is almost certainly in danger from Richard, too, does Carrie save Lo. But in the movie, Lo saves Carrie, giving us the much more predictable and much less satisfying dynamic of “award-winning reporter rescues vulnerable foreign woman.” The movie flattening Carrie into someone downtrodden and fragile, rather than standoffish and conflicted, makes the whole resolution feel a little too clean.
How does said rescue occur? To be fair, both versions of the story are a little overcomplicated. In the book, Carrie holds Lo captive, but then has a change of heart and frees her. Lo jumps from the yacht and swims to shore, where she hides from Norwegian police on Richard’s payroll and eventually makes it home to London. Two bodies are pulled from the water: Anne, who broke free of the suitcase but still drowned, and Richard, with a gunshot wound initially reported as self-inflicted. But then an autopsy confirms that he couldn’t have done it himself, and Lo receives a huge infusion of cash from a mysterious benefactor whom she knows to be Carrie — the implication being that Carrie killed Richard, stole some of his money, and started a new life for herself.
A lot of this occurs off-page, in contrast to the movie, which spells things out incredibly plainly. Carrie-as-Anne frees Lo and does sign a new will that gives money to Richard, but that night, Lo crashes the fundraising dinner packed with fancy rich people all celebrating the Bullmers. Lo traps Richard in a series of lies and reveals that who the partyers think is Anne is actually Carrie. Amid all the confusion, Richard takes Carrie hostage at knifepoint, and he’s pursued by Lo and his own head of security, Sigrid (Amanda Collin), who realizes that her new employer is really an asshole. As Richard tries to kill Carrie, Sigrid shoots him in the shoulder and Lo smashes him in the face with a piece of boating equipment. The three women stand over Richard’s dead body, and Lo then writes a huge exposé and becomes close friends with Carrie, who sends her video messages of her daughter. It’s pleasantly, simplistically feminist. But it’s just not as layered as the novel, in which everyone on the yacht — both men and women — can’t be trusted, and conflicts are based on more than just gender.
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