The Woman In Cabin 10 (2025)

On a superyacht off the coast of Norway, a journalist (Keira Knightley) sees a woman go overboard one night, but none of the other guests – a who's who of the business and entertainment worlds gathered for a charity event – believes her, in this Ruth Ware book adaptation that is first third run-of-the-mill murder mystery set-up (assorted characters gather on board a yacht), second third effective thriller that borrows liberally from Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, full of shocks and surprises as the journalist finds herself increasingly isolated, labelled mad, and drawn deeper and deeper into paranoia, and final third messy denouement – a terribly cliched gala event showdown – that makes no logistical sense; the middle third makes it worth watching the whole.

★★★☆☆

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Switch (2011)

A fashion designer in Montreal is encouraged to do a homeswap with someone in Paris, and for the first day this seems like it was a really good idea - she flirts with a man in a park, enjoys the city, sees the Eiffel Tower - but then on day two the fashion designer wakes up to the Parisian police knocking down her door accusing her of grisly murder and suddenly she's alone in a foreign country, accused of murder and even worse, on the case are only the most bungling of detectives believing her to be a Parisian psycho while unwilling or unable to make a simple phone call to Canada to verify the facts of her life - it is an intriguing set-up that has nowhere to go but stupid.

★★☆☆☆

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Fractured (2019)

Delivered in a muted, stilted 'Resident Evil cut-scene' monotone replete with ominous crows cawing from powerlines stretching across a desolate landscape, this "no-one believes her" thriller after Ethel Lina White's "The Wheel Spins" actually stars a man, for an interesting change, Sam Worthington, who loses his wife and daughter in a hospital but no-one there - not even the staff the man knows he and his family interacted with - says they were ever there, and it is perfectly gripping if somewhat monotone in its delivery of this well-trod So Long At The Fair fare, with an end that is genuinely a surprise, surprisingly - but an unwelcome one.

★★★☆☆

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Flightplan (2005)

Jodie Foster plays a mother searching an inflight jumbo passenger plane for her missing daughter while the passengers and crew members around her believe she is delusional and doesn't actually have a daughter on the plane or anywhere, in this 'nobody believes her' thriller that takes Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes from a transEuropean train and puts it 35,000 feet in the air, but this turns out to be a much lesser film than that classic on account of it taking itself way too seriously, because the movie reveals its underwhelming hand too early, because the plot doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and lastly because early scenes suggest a stark, dreamlike unreality which makes all that follows hard to care about.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Lady Vanishes (1979)

This 1979 Hammer Films remake of the 1938 Hitchcock classic is an unnecessary film greatly inferior to the original but it is camp fun with Cybill Shepherd cast perfectly as the badly behaved heroine who discovers a fellow trans-European train passenger, Miss Froy, has mysteriously disappeared - or perhaps she was never on board at all.

★★★☆☆

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Gone (2012)

Gone is one of those "no-one believes her" thrillers like The Lady Vanishes but unlike that masterpiece, Gone squanders its most interesting ideas and has a ludicrous ending that gives no consideration to the ramifications of its heroine's actions, meaning the movie fails even at being a satisfying b-grade thriller.

★☆☆☆☆

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Unknown (2011)

Unknown starts intriguingly, a bit like Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (an American in Europe suffers a head injury and then isn't believed) and ends excitingly, a bit like Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (a race against the clock to prevent an assassination attempt at a gathering of prominent world figures), but the stretch in between is too run-of-the-mill for too long, keeping this from being a suspense action great.

★★★☆☆

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The Lady Vanishes (1938)

A favourite film of mine, Hitchcock's  The Lady Vanishes is a rollicking comedy thriller in which a woman on a transEuropean train journey awakens to discover her elderly travelling companion, Miss Froy, has inexplicably disappeared.

★★★★★

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