Keira Knightley cuts a more glamorous figure than most Guardian staff in her new Netflix film The Woman in Cabin 10, while Tennant is a dead ringer for star reporter Nick Davies. But how convincing are they?
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n The Woman in Cabin 10, Netflix’s new potboiler, Keira Knightley plays a fearless justice warrior, a lone voice of dogged truth in a maelstrom of corruption, and this is not her first foray into such terrain: six years ago she played the whistleblower Katharine Gun in Official Secrets, the 2019 film about some pretty dicey US and UK behaviour before the Iraq war.
This time round she’s a journalist, though – and not just any old hack, a Guardian journalist. Exhausted and possibly traumatised by a crusading investigation she has just finished about some bad people doing bad things, she accepts a trip on a billionaire’s yacht for a breather, only to discover that billionaires are also bad. You cannot call that a spoiler, even though it technically is one. You’re reading the Guardian, for Pete’s sake.
Journalists on screen are always idealised, whatever paper they’re from – film amps up the tenacity, intelligence, commitment and, often, cardiovascular fitness of hacks, which is fair enough: that’s its business, to filter out frailty. The only rose-tint that bugs me with print journalism, and this has been bugging me since Almost Famous came out a quarter of a century ago, is that all the drama happens in a situation where interesting things are going down and the key players actively want to include a journalist. It just isn’t true to life. Any time a billionaire, or a rock quartet, or some generals, or a prime minister, actively want to talk to you, it’s to tell you something boring, to keep you busy. But this is a pet peeve; back to Knightley, on her yacht, being told real things, when a murder happens.
