The Woman in Cabin 10 follows Laura “Lo” Blacklock (Keira Knightley), an investigative journalist covering the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship. Exhausted and haunted by past trauma, witnessing a woman drown during a previous exposé, Lo is far from a carefree traveler.
Her editor’s reminders that she overworks only hint at the deeper reasons behind her relentless drive: avoidance and a need for redemption.
Based on Ruth Ware’s novel and directed by Simon Stone, the film grounds itself in psychological tension rather than flashy thrills. Lo’s world is suddenly upended when, during the night, she believes she witnesses a woman thrown overboard.
What follows is an isolating and frustrating ordeal, as every passenger and crew member insists no such person exists, and the yacht’s records report the cabin in question as empty and untouched.
Lo’s isolation is palpable; the luxury yacht’s pristine but dim corridors resemble a prison more than a haven. Her gaslighting by the wealthy guests and crew creates an intense atmosphere of paranoia and distrust.
The passengers, including a cancer-stricken woman named Anne Bullmer, her wealthy husband Richard (Guy Pearce), and a mix of socialites and influencers, provide both suspects and distractions, shrouding the truth behind their polished facades.
Psychological Elements Drive the Suspense
The film leans heavily on psychological thriller conventions. Lo’s trauma colors her perception, making viewers question what’s real. Is she being gaslit because she’s troubled? Or is there a darker secret aboard the ship? These questions propel the plot, maintaining engagement throughout its brisk runtime of just over 90 minutes.
Knightley’s performance anchors the story with an effective blend of exhaustion, suspicion, and relentless determination.
Her discomfort around the rich guests is clear, and her body language constantly shifts between wariness and resolve, always ready to confront or retreat. This makes her a relatable and sympathetic center in a story about power, denial, and truth.
Supporting characters such as Lo’s ex, Ben (David Ajala), provide a personal connection but remain somewhat underdeveloped, their roles primarily advancing the mystery.
Throughout, the narrative reveals small cracks in the veneer of the elite gathering, exposing secrets and motives in a loosely Agatha Christie-style whodunit. The yacht, with its tight quarters and cold, steely color palette, effectively claustrophobes the viewer, emphasizing Lo’s sense of entrapment.
A Tense Yet Familiar Mystery
While the story never quite escapes familiar thriller tropes, it delivers a focused, compact narrative. It avoids excessive subplots or drawn-out explanations, prioritizing a steady accumulation of suspense and gradual revelation.
Moments of significant plot twists break the tension, steering the story toward an explosive finale that, while not overly dramatic, feels earned. The film balances several themes, including the isolation of trauma, the power dynamics of wealth, and the dogged pursuit of truth despite opposition.
The Woman In Cabin 10 (Credit: Netflix)
Despite some plot conveniences and a predictable core, The Woman in Cabin 10 offers enough intrigue and character conflict to keep viewers invested. Its restrained approach means it never fully gratifies fans seeking relentless action or shocking surprises, but it succeeds as a steady, watchable mystery with emotional stakes.
Visually, Simon Stone’s direction uses the yacht’s setting as a key storytelling element. The minimalistic design, gray tones, shining surfaces, and narrow hallways work to frame the psychological imbalance at the heart of the film.
The luxury setting contrasts starkly with the underlying darkness, delivering a subtle critique of wealth’s isolating and sometimes corrupting influence.
A Solid Yet Unremarkable Thriller
The Woman in Cabin 10 succeeds as a compact, atmospheric thriller carried by Keira Knightley’s strong lead performance and a gripping sense of psychological tension. Though it stumbles with some clichés and predictable twists, its tight focus and claustrophobic setting provide an engaging mystery for fans of the genre.
The film does not reinvent the wheel but uses its elements well enough to provide tension and a mild catharsis.
Its themes of trust, perception, and trauma add depth beneath the surface, reminding viewers that sometimes truth is not just hidden; it’s actively erased by those who deny and disregard it. For those open to a suspenseful, character-driven mystery aboard a stunning but unsettling backdrop, this film largely delivers.
Few films mislead their audience quite like Stay, directed by Jas Summers and headlining Hulu’s much-hyped “Huluween” lineup. With glossy cinematography and an emotional opening montage, the movie promises a story blending heartfelt drama and psychological horror.
The first few minutes glide from black-and-white wedding bliss to saturated domestic scenes, and finally, to muted blues of a relationship in ruins. It’s a striking visual metaphor for love lost. Unfortunately, that emotional precision fades away soon after the credits stop rolling.
At its center are Kiara (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Miles (Mo McRae), a once-passionate couple now suffocating under regret and resentment. The film teases their complex past while forcing us into their chaotic present: two broken people packing boxes and throwing blame across a darkly lit home.
There’s texture in their pain, but Summers renders it shallow by keeping too much hidden for too long. The big twist, which arrives far too late, feels like the answer to a question we stopped asking.
Haunted by Style, Emptied of Substance
The idea behind Stay holds promise: two people trying to move out of a home that literally refuses to let them leave until they confront their shared trauma.
If handled with emotional sincerity and tension, that setup could make an impressive horror-drama hybrid. Instead, the movie feels afraid of its own themes, hiding behind standard genre tricks rather than confronting the emotional decay at its heart.
The film toggles awkwardly between timelines, showing fragments of happiness and resentment scattered across their relationship. This fragmented storytelling aims for depth but ends up draining empathy. Viewers aren’t guided through their heartbreak; they’re left guessing, and not in a good way.
The flashbacks, instead of expanding our understanding, crowd the narrative with repetitive arguments that loop without clarity and unspecific accusations that sound like a broken record.
Summers’ approach suggests that mystery equals meaning, but withholding context doesn’t make a story profound. Instead, it alienates.
As Kiara and Miles wander their house filled with boxes and ghosts, we sense the weight of something tragic, yet the screenplay keeps details just out of reach. By the time the truth about their breakup and haunting arrives, both revelations land with a faint echo instead of emotional thunder.
When Horror Forgets to Terrify
If Stay had leaned stronger into supernatural terror, it might have redeemed its pacing. But even the scares feel recycled. Kiara’s lonely walks through dim hallways, sudden creaks, and mirrors with sinister reflections tick off nearly every haunted house cliché in modern horror.
A phonograph starts playing by itself, Miles is dragged across the floor, and strange noises echo without a narrative purpose. These moments might once have worked in isolation, but lined up one after another, they inspire more eye-rolls than chills.
Stay (Credit: Netflix)
The tragedy is that Summers occasionally touches real promise. One sequence, in which Miles relives the breakup through Kiara’s perspective, briefly suggests that introspection and emotional horror could coexist. For a moment, the film gains texture.
But just when it could turn inward and reveal the couple’s true damage, the scene fades, replaced again by empty sensory scares. It’s a microcosm of the movie’s problems: compelling ideas surface, then vanish before they can mean something.
Hulu has positioned Stay as a “Huluween flagship,” yet it feels oddly unfinished. Its horror setup could have matched the platform’s earlier hits if the execution weren’t so uneven.
Instead, this film becomes symptomatic of Hulu’s recent streak of underwhelming originals, where aesthetics replace storytelling and twists exist just for the trailer.
The Tragedy Inside the Twist
The final act finally reveals what tore Kiara and Miles apart, what force now binds them, and how they might break free. The tragedy at the center is poignant on paper, a shared trauma that left them suspended between love and guilt, but its late introduction turns catharsis into confusion.
By saving every crucial revelation for the finale, Summers robs her characters of gradual evolution. Instead of watching two people slowly confront their ghosts, we’re handed an emotional dump moments before the credits roll.
It’s easy to sense what the director wanted: a story about how grief lingers like an unexorcised spirit. The house becomes a metaphor and a prison, a memory and a mistake.
Yet meaningful subtext can’t thrive when every symbol arrives bluntly and every scare repeats itself. What should feel haunting ends up hollow, like a memory repeated until it loses its weight.
Megalyn Echikunwoke and Mo McRae deserve credit for grounding such unfocused material. Their performances suggest emotional depth that the script fails to explore. You can see longing and resentment flicker across their faces even when dialogue falters.
Sadly, their effort highlights the movie’s missed opportunities. The emotional resonance is there, trapped beneath a script unwilling to let it breathe.
Why Stay Struggles to Stay With You
There’s a line buried beneath the noise: Stay wants to remind us that we can’t move forward until we confront our pain. It aims to turn emotional paralysis into supernatural horror, but in withholding that pain for most of the runtime, it severs the audience from its heart.
We never feel truly inside the couple’s experience, only near the surface of it, wandering the same haunted corridors they do, unsure what we’re looking for. Suspense becomes fatigue.
At its best moments, the film glimmers with craft, elegant lighting, a moody score, and sharp editing but form without function can’t sustain engagement. By the final scene, as the haunting resolves in a predictably tragic twist, many viewers will be reflecting less on the story’s message than on how frustratingly out of focus it felt.
Stay feels like a cautionary tale about modern streaming horror: promising setups sacrificed to maintain mystery, emotional depth traded for jump scares, and great actors stranded in half-realized arcs.
While it means well in its commentary on emotional imprisonment, its structure keeps it too distant to move us. The potential for a powerful exploration of love, grief, and spiritual reckoning is there, buried beneath formulaic scares and fragmented storytelling.
For a film that wants to be about confronting the truth, Stay hides far too much for far too long. The result is a technically competent yet spiritually hollow story that leaves both its characters and its viewers trapped in a loop of repetition.
Hulu’s horror experiment deserved better, especially from a film that promised to blend heartache and haunting into one unforgettable experience.
