Based on an airport thriller by Ruth Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10 stars Keira Knightley as a journalist invited onto a superyacht to interview a terminal ill billionaire planning on donating her fortune to charity. But then she witnesses a woman fall overboard (believe it or not, from Cabin 10) – only to find that there was nobody staying in Cabin 10 and no evidence of anyone falling overboard. The film doesn’t just require the suspension of disbelief, it requires the suspension of all critical faculties, and despite the valiant efforts of a strong cast just doesn’t work. Still, Benjamin Wallfisch (who seemed to love the film based on his social media posts) rose above it to provide a score which adds a sheen of class to proceedings thanks to its classic thriller techniques.
The most striking cues are the first two – the slightly Herrmannesque (via Basic Instinct) strings of the opening “The Yacht”, and then the score’s only upbeat piece “Embarkation”, which has at times a nice choppy seafaring feel to it. After this, we have a series of increasingly-desperate pieces of tension – a mixture of more action-dominated pieces (to which the composer adds various grating effects to the orchestra, both acoustic and electronic I believe) and more suspenseful string-laden psychological terror. Occasionally it can be a little unpleasant (by design, of course) but for the most it’s perfectly listenable. While the may be nothing particularly revolutionary here and it will probably end up as a bit of a footnote to Wallfisch’s filmography, it’s like one of those thriller scores we used to get all the time in the 1990s and passes the time perfectly well.
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