Narrator trope done to death

The Woman in Cabin 10, a watery thriller that recently dropped on Netflix, is based on a bestselling suspense novel by Ruth Ware.

Sort of.

Ware’s 2016 work relied on the “unreliable female narrator” trope that was flooding the market around that time, in books like Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (2015) and A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window (2018). In this often woozy and wine-soaked genre, a traumatized and unhappy woman, given to blackout drinking or the overuse of prescription pills, witnesses some kind of terrible crime, but is unable to convince anyone of what she’s seen.

This plot once seemed inescapable, which is why it’s interesting that the new movie adaptation of Ware’s book pushes the unreliable-female-narrator cliché overboard right away. In fact, The Woman in Cabin 10’s protagonist, Laura “Lo” Blacklock (played by Pride & Prejudice’s Keira Knightley), is not only not unreliable, she’s super-reliable, being a hard-hitting investigative journalist who’s worked in the world’s most dangerous conflict zones.

In the novel, Lo is a third-string travel writer stuck in an entry-level job. After a break-in at her flat, she’s struggling with anxiety and PTSD and self-medicating with way too much alcohol. She hopes a lucky professional break covering a luxury cruise will get her back on track.

In the movie, Lo is a star reporter at The Guardian. Feeling burned out after a difficult assignment, she decides to take a gig involving a few glamorous days and nights on a superyacht, writing a puff piece about a billionaire couple’s new charity.

The slightly scruffy Lo does stick out amid the usual Triangle of Sadness-type characters — a tech mogul, a young influencer, an aging rock star, an odious power couple. And when she tells them a woman has been murdered in the cabin next to hers, she is patronized and dismissed.

Still, despite some personal issues and several external obstacles — disappearing evidence, conflicting stories, condescension — Knightley’s Lo is never less than crisp, competent and in control. Clearly, director Simon Stone and his scripting team have decided that unreliable, imperiled female protagonists just don’t work right now.

Stone might have been tipped off by another Netflix production, 2022’s The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. As that preposition-heavy title suggests, this spoof dredges up every boozy trope of the Girl/Woman thriller. In TWITHATSFTGITW, the heroine (Kristen Bell) gets day-drunk on red wine poured into ludicrously large glasses, while reading books with titles like The Woman Across the Lake and The Girl on the Cruise.

It’s not a particularly funny or smart satire, but it does call attention to a cliché that’s been done to death.

The unreliable-female-narrator trope comes partly from gothic novels of the 19th century, topped up by the had-I-but-only-known subgenre of mystery’s Golden Age. It got a twisty and very effective contemporary take in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), but has become overused in the last decade, a problem that seems even more apparent when transferred to the screen.

Even Emily Blunt couldn’t save the 2016 film adaptation of The Girl on the Train from being tedious and tepid. Despite a prestige cast and crew (including director Joe Wright, scripter Tracy Lett and star Amy Adams), The Woman in the Window (2021) still ended up a murky, mopey slog.

As well, some critics and commentators have begun to question all these trauma-scarred narratives in which a woman is labelled, sidelined and gaslit by male authority figures. Are these explorations or exploitations? Are they critiquing the patriarchal power structure or just wallowing in female pain?

The Woman in Cabin 10 does manage to leave behind an old, outworn convention. Too bad it doesn’t find something better to replace it with. This new screen version suffers from deflated suspense, plotting that doesn’t make a lick of sense and an ending that descends into nonsense.

Our revamped protagonist may be reliable. Unfortunately, she’s also dull.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca