"In 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."
Keira Knightley portrays a fearless journalist who previously played whistleblower Katharine Gun. Exhausted and possibly traumatised by a crusading investigation, she accepts a breather aboard a billionaire's yacht and discovers further corruption and murder. Onscreen journalists are consistently idealised, with film amplifying tenacity, intelligence, commitment and even physical fitness while filtering out frailty. A recurring rose-tint positions journalists unrealistically at the heart of unfolding drama because powerful figures conveniently include them. Guardian-focused dramas receive bespoke idealisation, glamorizing the newsroom and elevating hacks into dogged solitary voices of truth amid institutional corruption.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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