The Woman in Cabin 10’ Review: Keira Knightley Does Hitchcock on a Yacht

A journalist accepts an invitation for a boat trip and soon sets out to solve a mystery in this rocky movie co-starring Guy Pearce and Hannah Waddingham.

Alfred Hitchcock might have done great things with Keira Knightley, even if she isn’t an ice blonde and usually doesn’t scream like Janet Leigh. He might also have done something with mystery writer Ruth Ware’s “The Woman in Cabin 10,” other than moving “The Lady Vanishes” from a train to a boat and then going quite gleefully overboard.

‘The Woman in Cabin 10’ Review: Keira Knightley Does Hitchcock on a Yacht

Directed and co-written by Simon Stone (“The Dig”) and based on Ms. Ware’s 2016 novel, “The Woman in Cabin 10” is the standard-issue missing-person mystery in which a character knows someone has disappeared but is either dismissed as delusional or gaslighted by the guilty. For Laura “Lo” Blacklock, it’s a bit of both. But why is she even on board? A top reporter for the Guardian in London, she’s just back from an assignment during which a female source was purposely drowned. Traumatized, exhausted and ready for a break, she accepts a heady invitation: A trip to the Norwegian fjords aboard a yacht owned by the Bullmers—shipping heiress Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), who has stage 4 leukemia, and her husband, Richard (Guy Pearce), who is about to announce a foundation in his wife’s name. All they want from Lo is a story about their largesse; no anonymous donations here. No aquaphobia from Lo. And no rules at the Guardian, apparently, regarding outrageous boondoggles and ocean-going junkets.

Guy Pearce

This critic is a sucker for Ms. Knightley, so please disregard anything here that sounds remotely positive. Because it really is a ludicrous exercise, the kind one hopes was fun for the actors because the results are so wacky, and the cast so prestigious. In addition to Mr. Pearce and Ms. Knightley, the guests aboard the multidecked Aurora Borealis—with its “Lady From Shanghai” mirrors and 80-degree spiral staircases—are played by Hannah Waddingham (“Ted Lasso”), David Morrissey (“The Walking Dead”), Art Malik (“The Jewel in the Crown,” going back a few years), Kaya Scodelario (“The Gentlemen”), Daniel Ings (“The Crown”) and Paul Kaye (“Game of Thrones”), all portraying people with no evident means of support but who are very rich and, as such, know each other socially. It is difficult to say whether anyone gives a credible performance, partly because the script—by Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse and Mr. Stone, from an original adaptation by Emma Frost—is so inconsistent in its characterizations. And because everyone is pretending to be something he or she is not.

Regarding that woman in cabin 10: Lo hears an argument and splash one night shortly after setting sail and looks out to see someone in the water. She alerts the ship’s officers, who alert the Coast Guard, and the entirety of the North Atlantic is awakened only to find no one missing from the passenger list and a mysterious blood stain gone from a wall. No one was occupying cabin 10, Lo is told. But she won’t give up and we know she won’t. What the Bullmers and company should have known is not to bring a crusading journalist aboard a boat where so much skullduggery is on the itinerary, and so many spoilers in the cargo hold.

The Woman in Cabin 10

Friday, Netflix

Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.

‘The Woman in Cabin 10’ Review: Keira Knightley Does Hitchcock on a Yacht