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Synopsis:
Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Review:
The movie adaptation of The Woman in Cabin 10 was just released on Netflix, and I decided that since I had the hardback on my shelf for almost nine years, I should finally read it. I am glad that I delved into the novel before I watched the film because there are so many nuances to the story that are completely lost in the adaptation that are integral to the success of Ruth Ware’s story.
The novel starts with Lo Blacklock, a travel journalist who is trying to make a name for herself at a magazine, getting an invitation to go on the inaugural cruise of the Aurora, a private ship that is owned by Richard Bullmer’s company. After she gets settled into her cabin and has too many drinks the first night of the cruise, she is woken by a fight and a splash of someone going overboard, someone from cabin 10. When she causes an alarm that someone is in the water, she is informed that Cabin 10 has been empty. The rest of the novel perfectly unfolds in the tight quarters of a ship at sea, where someone has to know what happened and someone on the boat has to be the killer. Of course the way that the other passengers and staff treat her, like she is delusional due to her her anxiety and stress or she was just drunk and hearing things, makes for a much more intense experience than the film because they use gaslighting and coverup to try to get Lo Blacklock to stop asking questions.
For a novel that is not necessarily something that I would normally read, I enjoyed the isolated setting of it. The ship is all alone on the sea. There is no communication between the passengers and anyone off of the boat, and this isolation intensities the danger. The claustrophobic feeling reminds me of the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes, where a woman vanishes on a speeding train and everyone tries to convince the passengers that the lady never existed. Ruth Ware takes the feeling that Lo cannot trust anyone on the ship except for what she knows, even when people are assuring her that her memories are wrong, and ratchets up the mystery and the danger until Lo is in just as much danger as the woman she heard splash into the water.
The film falls short of the novel, like most movies do, because it cuts out some of the major tension that the novel has, particularly how her past mental health was used against her to gaslight her into making her doubt herself, and how there are people at home, off of the boat, particularly a boyfriend, that are looking for her when she is missing after the ship is docked at their destination. The novel makes the reader feel like Blacklock is in more danger than in the movie, and the final act is far more interesting and well structured than the ending of the movie. I definitely would read the novel again before I watched the movie again.
ghostvillehero 