Netflix's New Movie Adapts a Hit Book-and Makes Some Crucial Changes. It's Thrilling.

"Sometimes the most engaging puzzle a thriller has to offer is deducing the calculations that went into creating it-what a colleague of mine used to refer to as the "plot math." Ruth Ware's 2016 novel The Woman in Cabin 10-now adapted as a film for Netflix by Simon Stone ( The Dig)-became a bestseller by combining a classic Agatha Christie-style manor-house mystery with the mid-2010s trend of unreliable female narrators spawned by Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train."

"As a variation on the isolated country house, setting The Woman in Cabin 10 on a cruise ship at sea sounds ingenious-if you've forgotten that Christie already did it in Death on the Nile. Making the trip a small luxury cruise keeps the cast of suspects few and glamorous. But in the mid-2010s, all the rage was for thrillers told from the perspective of an average, relatable woman under duress, usually recovering from some trauma and self-medicating with too much booze."

"Like the narrators of The Girl on the Train and A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window, Ware's Laura "Lo" Blacklock believes she has witnessed a murder, but everyone writes her off as a hysterical female under the influence of too much champagne. Since the average woman doesn't typically go on an opulent ship like the Aurora Borealis with rich people she doesn't really know, Ware had to figure out how to get Lo on a posh stateroom balcony on the other side of a privacy screen from a terrible crime"

A bestselling thriller fuses Agatha Christie-style closed-circle plotting with the mid-2010s vogue for unreliable, often intoxicated female narrators. The isolated-country-house formula is transposed to a luxury cruise, concentrating suspects while echoing earlier river-and-sea mysteries. The protagonist, Laura "Lo" Blacklock, is a travel journalist on a ship's maiden voyage who believes she witnesses a murder but is dismissed as hysterical and inebriated. A prior home-invasion intensified her anxiety and hypervigilance, making her seem unreliable. Casting a glamorous star like Keira Knightley for a screen version complicates the character's awkwardness and requires recalibrating the narrative "plot math."

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