The Woman in Cabin 10 - Netflix 2025 film review

Ruth Ware is a very successful writer whose novels of psychological suspense show a real talent for, and commitment to, ingenious plotting. Over the past fifteen years or so there have been many psychological thrillers that are said to have 'a jaw-dropping twist', but in some cases, I find that the finale is quite a let-down. It's one thing to come up with a brilliant premise, something else to deliver a resolution that doesn't disappoint. Ruth Ware's ability to do both is what has put her in the elite. I've never met her in person, but I did once chair an online panel on which she was a speaker, and very good she and her distinguished colleagues were too.

I read her novel The Woman in Cabin 10 several years ago, and now I've had a chance to watch the Netflix version of the book. It's a story that seems to me to be a modern version of the kind of emotional thriller at which Cornell Woolrich used to excel - in books like Phantom Lady. A protagonist comes across someone, who promptly disappears - and everyone else denies that they ever existed. This is a set-up that I love, as long as the explanation works.

The cast is very good. The consistently excellent Keira Knightley plays Lo Blacklock, a journalist invited to join a party on a superyacht owned by billionaire Anne Bulmer, who is terminally ill, and her husband Richard (Guy Pearce). The guests include a doctor played by Art Malik and a chap called Heatherley (David Morrissey). The production, equally, is top-notch.

Lo finds herself in the wrong cabin (cabin 10, next to her own) while trying to avoid her ex, a photographer who just so happens to be on board. In cabin 10, she sees a woman, to whom she apologises before making a hasty exit. But that night, someone goes overboard and Lo is convinced it's the woman in cabin 10. The snag is everyone tells her that cabin 10 was never occupied, and there's no sign of the woman she saw.

The solution to the puzzle, when it emerges, is not totally original, but that's fine - true originality is vanishingly rare. The way the story is presented works well. Of course, some suspension of disbelief is required. But I enjoyed this one. 

    

Forgotten Book - The Unicorn Murders

 'You are on holiday in Paris...There is nothing on your mind, and you are utterly at peace with all the world...Then you see walking towards you a girl you have previously known in England...[who] walks straight up to your table and veryy gravely begins to repeat a nursery rhyme. She then sits down at the table and proceeds to tell you what sounds like the most bewildering gibberish you have ever heard in your life.'

So begins The Unicorn Murders by Carter Dickson, narrated by Ken Blake (also the narrator of The Plague Court Murders) who humours the girl, Evelyn Cheyne, and thus 'became involved in a series of events which can still retrospectively give me a shiver...' It's a tantalising start to an unusual story, which blends a secret service thriller with a cerebral 'impossible crime' problem and plenty of twists in the finest tradition of whodunits.

Sir Henry Merrivale is a former employer of Ken and before long he comes on to the scene. After a series of unlikely events, Sir Henry, Ken, and Evelyn wind up in a French chateau, along with a superstar French detective and a French master criminal. But who is the detective and who is the super-criminal? And how are two murders, apparently inflicted by the horn of a unicorn, actually committed?

This is a complex mystery, so complex that Sir Henry's explanation at the end of the book is necessarily lengthy. But he does tie together all the many strands of a convoluted plot that tests one's suspension of disbelief to the limit. However, I'd say that Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr, of course) just about manages to make it all work, quite an achievement. A rollicking read.  

The Truman Show - 1998 film review

I watched The Truman Show not too long after its original release in 1998 and loved it. Now that 'reality TV' has become omnipresent on the schedules, I thought it was worth taking another look to see if it still stands up well after more than a quarter of a century. The short answer is that it does, and that it still offers far more in terms of thought-provoking entertainment than any reality TV show I've ever heard of.

The concept is brilliant in its simplicity, as well as in the fact that quite a few people will be tempted to identify with the psychology of Truman Burbank's situation. He is a young man who lives in the delightful island of Seahaven, blissfully unaware that he is the star of a globally popular reality TV show and that all the people who surround him are actors. However, the truth slowly starts to dawn on him, much to the dismay of the show's creators, who devise all kinds of (often very amusing) ways to deter him from trying to escape from the wholly artificial world - full of product placement - in which he lives.

The Truman Show is a great film because it works extremely well on more than one level. There are some genuinely funny scenes, as well as some that are quite poignant. Jim Carrey is at his very best as Truman, while Andrew Niccol;s script is excellent. Apparently the director Peter Weir persuaded Niccol to shift his approach from purely dystopian to something more nuanced and humour-laced, and this works very successfully.

I must say that I am not a fan of reality TV and I avoid it whenever I can. But of course it's hard to escape and so I have seen quite a few examples (even though I've never managed to stomach a complete episode of Big Brother or its variants). It seems to me that it's better described as 'unreality TV'. There's something unpleasant and arguably unhealthy about a lot of it; certainly real life seems to me to be too interesting and valuable to fritter much of it away on that kind of stuff. The Truman Show exposes the shallowness of this particular form of entertainment, but it does so in a way that is appealing rather than preachy. Unlike any reality TV shows that I'm aware of, this film has stood the test of time. 

Salt - 2010 film review

Salt is an action thriller starring Angelina Jolie. The writer, Kurt Wimmer, has a number of film credits, including co-writing the remake of that notable 60s film The Thomas Crown Affair, while the director, Philip Noyce, has directed such films as Dead Calm and The Bone Collector. So a strong team was involved.

The film begins with scenes in North Korea. Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is suspected of spying and after she is given some rough treatment the CIA arranges a prisoner exchange to secure her release. She is reunited with her boyfriend Mike, who has been campaigning on her behalf. He proposes marriage even though she admits to him that she is indeed a CIA operative.

After this preamble, we get into the meat of the story. Salt is interrogating a Russian defector called Orlov together with a couple of her colleagues. Orlov claims to have knowledge of a plan for Russian sleeper agents to attack the US; part of the scheme involves one of those agents assassinating the Russian president. And then he reveals the name of that agent...which is Evelyn Salt.

This is in many ways an update of the 'who can you trust?' Cold War movies of the 60s and 70s, and it has itself in some respects been superseded by more recent political developments. Angelina Jolie's charismatic screen presence makes the film watchable enough, but I felt that some of the action scenes verged on the cartoonish and that it became increasingly difficult to care whose side Evelyn Salt was really on. Not a bad film, but as far as I was concerned, a bit of a disappointment.

The Lair of the White Worm - 1988 film review

Ken Russell had many qualities as a film-maker, but I wouldn't put subtlety at the top of the list, even though I enjoyed several of the movies he directed. I've now caught up with his adaptation of Bram Stoker's story The Lair of the White Worm, and 'over the top' is barely an adequate description. You have to regard it as a comic horror film, I think, with the emphasis on 'comic', though there are a few scenes that are definitely not for the faint-hearted. But for all its absurdity, it has a certain appeal as a guilty pleasure, which is why it's achieved something of a cult reputation.

The cast is terrific. It includes the young Peter Capaldi, the young Hugh Grant, and, in a small part, Gina McKee. Stratford Johns, better known to cop show fans as Charlie Barlow, makes an unexpected appearance. And Amanda Donohoe (who else?) plays the sultry temptress Lady Sylvia Marsh. Sammi Davis is quite good as Mary Trent, although Catherine Oxenburg, playing her sister, acts as though she'd rather be doing something else.

The locations include a sinister cavern which is actually Thor's Cave, in Wetton, Staffordshire. It looks intriguing and watching the film made me want to visit the cave one day. On the assumption, of course, that there are no monsters lurking in the hidden depths of the cavern's interior...

I haven't read the book, but I've no doubt that Russell's adaptation is a very loose one. He also updates the storyline to the 1980s. Briefly, it features an old legend about a monstrous worm and it's pretty barmy throughout. But the ending is surprisingly good and, whatever else one can say about the film, it doesn't lack pace or incident. 

Forgotten Book - The Tremayne Case

Before I move on to today's Forgotten Book, can I thank everyone who has subscribed to The Life of Crime Premium, my new monthly Substack newsletter, the first issue of which came out last weekend. The response, and the comments from subscribers who have signed up, have been very motivating. The first supplementary newsletter will come out in the next few days and I'm already working on next month's main newsletter, which will give exclusive insights into and info about the British Library's Crime Classics. If you're interested, you can check it out here. 

Alan Thomas made a strong impression with his first novel, The Death of Laurence Vining, and he followed it up in 1929 with The Tremayne Case. I have a copy that he inscribed to Lady Gladstone, which has a facsimile dust jacket. I was amused to note that the front cover has the title and the publisher's name, but not the author's name, which is confined to the spine. But as you can see, on the front cover is the phrase 'a murder mystery'. Since the death in question is deemed by an inquest to be a case of suicide, this amounts to a bit of a spoiler, I'd have thought, even if the vast majority of readers will figure out that there's more to the death of the victim than meets the eye.

One extremely interesting facet of the story is that the plot involves a fake telephone call to lure someone out of the way and I'll be discussing this type of story element further in a future supplement to The Life of Crime Premium.

We see events from the point of view of a young chap called Jimmy Thurston. He falls in love with a young woman he sees at the opera and shows characteristic determination in tracking her down. He becomes friendly with her and her father, but has a rival in a man called Darcy, and also in an acquaintance called Tremayne. 

Suffice to say that this is an 'impossible crime' mystery, and the central trick is a good one in my opinion. The dust jacket blurb describes the story as 'quite definitely a masterpiece'. I wouldn't go that far, but I enjoyed reading it, even if the relentless xenophobia displayed by numerous characters including Jimmy was a bit much. Alan Thomas wrote readably and had some good ideas, making it a surprise that he's faded so far out of sight. I've now read three of his novels and I'd be glad to read more.

Still of the Night - 1982 film review

I watched Still of the Night at a cinema in central London, not too long after its release in 1982. Starring Roy Scheider, then a very big name, and Meryl Streep, who was already establishing a considerable reputation, it was a film in the Hitchcock vein. I recall enjoying it, without being absolutely bowled over by it, and I decided it was worth seeing it again. Would my reaction be very different?

The short answer is no. The film is quite stylishly made, and the quality of the acting is a real strength. The plotting? Not so much, although it's not bad. There are lots of hat-tips to the Master of Suspense, but the script, co-written by director Robert Benton and David Newman, does lack the energy of the best Hitchcock films. One bonus feature is the music, written by John Kander, whom I associate with musicals such as Cabaret.

There's a good opening scene, in which a wannabe car thief opens a car door - only for the body of a man to fall out. He's been stabbed to death. The deceased turns out to be George Bynum (Josef Sommer), a womaniser who was a senior employee at a famous auction house and a patient of psychiatrist Sam Rice (Scheider). 

The police (Joe Grifasi is good as the cop in charge of the murder investigation) visit Rice, who is less than helpful, citing patient confidentiality even though his patient is dead. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn of Bynum's affair with a junior colleague, Brooke Reynolds (Streep), and soon Rice gets to meet Brooke. It's fun to see Streep playing an icy Hitchcock blonde; needless to say, she does it well.

I didn't really warm to Scheider's character, though this is largely because the script doesn't characterise him very strongly, and I felt this was a drawback. But it's a very watchable film. Not in the same league as Body Heat (which I'd watched a year or so before), but competent entertainment. And perhaps because of the homage elements, it certainly hasn't aged as badly as some other movies made around the same time.

Dept Q - Netflix review

Dept Q is a nine-part Netflix series based on a book by Jussi Adler-Olsen. To be honest, when I realised this was a show in nine hour-long segments, I feared that it would be padded out, as quite a few series on Netflix and other platforms are. Luckily, I was wrong. This is a pacy and fascinating story which gripped me from start to finish.

The setting of the story has been transplanted to Scotland from Scandinavia. I can't judge how faithful the screenplay (by Scott Frank and Chandni Lakhani) is to the original, which I haven't read, but it certainly worked for me. Episode one begins in dramatic fashion, as bantering cop Carl Morck, his partner and pal James Hardy, and a young police officer, are shot while investigating a murder. Morck is wounded, Hardly paralysed, and the young cop killed. 

When Morck finally returns to work, he is assigned to a new cold case unit, Department Q, a sort of Department of Dead Ends brought up to date. His new colleagues are a Syrian civilian called Akram and a young woman, Rose. They start to look into the case of a vanished lawyer, Merritt Lingard (a very demanding role, expertly handled by Chloe Pirrie). Morck is played quite superbly by Matthew Goode, while Alexev Manjelov is wonderful as Akram, the perfect foil. A great double act.

The story is complex but skilfully told, and the cast, which includes those consistently good performers Mark Bonnar and Kelly Macdonald, does justice to the script. This is a dark story, with some upsetting scenes and no shortage of bad language, but it works very well. Yes, you do have to suspend your disbelief from start to finish. But it's worth it.   

Forgotten Book - Crime Wave

One of the reasons why I regard Martin Russell as an interesting crime writer, a cut above many of the prolific authors who were his stable-mates in the Collins Crime Club for many years, is that he came up with a considerable number of unusual ideas for his storylines, never seeming to be content with the same-old, same-old. Couple with that his facility for writing readable prose, and you have someone who, I think, never quite received as much acclaim as he deserved.

In his early days, he wrote four books about Jim Larkin, who was (like Russell) a journalist. My guess is that eventually he found that a series character cramped his style and his imagination, and so Jim was consigned to history, or at least domestic bliss. Crime Wave (1974) was the third novel to feature him and it showcases both Russell's strengths and limitations.

The setting is Eden Village, a suburb in the green belt, to which Jim and his wife Bunty have moved. However, as you might guess, serpents have invaded Eden. A series of muggings, possibly connected with young people who are members of a local youth club, disrupts the tranquility of the place, and soon the seriousness of the crime wave begins to escalate. After a low-key start, the tension mounts. And then murder is done.

I figured out quite early one key element of what was going on, but the other major ingredient of the plot eluded me. This is, I have to say, partly due to the fact that a crucial piece of information is concealed from the reader, and I don't think Martin Russell worked quite hard enough to foreshadow his startling final twist. Had he done so, I'd have rated the book as excellent. As it is, this is a highly readable novel which supplies solid entertainment.

Lord of the Flies - BBC TV review

I was sixteen when I read Lord of the Flies for the first time, as part of a small but memorable educational experiment. I'd opted to do English as one of my four A-Level subjects, and my group had two youngish, very trendy teachers, 'Dicky' Junemann and Derek Morris. They decided to ignore the exam syllabus for the first term and introduce us to a range of novels with a view to broadening our literary horizons. At that time, it was an extraordinary thing to do, and I doubt it happened in many schools then or certainly now. But for me, it was brilliant, because broadening my horizons was exactly what it did. I've never forgotten that time, or those teachers, or the books I read (or the efforts that went into making up for much lost time with all the reading we were actually required to do for the exams!)

I loved Lord of the Flies. It's a bleak book and I suppose I didn't 'get' every nuance, but it made a great impression on me. There have always been critics who argue that the picture it presents of humanity is too dark and pessimistic. I didn't agree then, and I haven't changed my mind. Similarly, I vividly remember discussing Waiting for Godot at around the same time with a sixth former who was a year older than me; he thought it was too depressing to be a great play, but again I didn't agree. One can have a positive view of human nature, as I think I do, and still recognise the potential for very dark behaviour in the best of people, let alone the worst. Perhaps this perspective is also relevant to the appeal of crime fiction? (And of course, Lord of the Flies, although not a crime novel in any superficial sense, does deal with murder).

At that time, we were also shown Peter Brook's great film of the book (along with daring films of the time like If) and again I was impressed. So when the BBC announced a four-part series based on the book, I was very keen to watch it. And, having just watched the final episode last night, I must say that I think that screenwriter Jack Thorne and everyone else did a very good job of adapting the story, and capturing its timelessness. The music is striking, as is the cinematography, and the young actors do a great job in challenging roles; it can't have been easy for them.

Lord of the Flies was written in the 50s, but I read it in the 70s, and it felt very timely then. The 70s were a good decade for me personally, but I was conscious that a great deal was wrong with society, and that the potential for mob violence in real life, as in the book, was bubbling just beneath the surface unhappiness of those times. In the same way, screening Lord of the Flies in Britain in 2026 seems - I'm sorry to say - rather like a masterstroke. We live in unhappy times, not so very different in some respects from the 70s, and this classic story remains too meaningful, and too thought-provoking, for comfort.