Woman in Cabin 10 A fearless Keira Knightley on a yacht? No, being a hack isn't really like that

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.

- Zoe Williams

Keira Knightley with David Ajala in the Netflix show The Woman in Cabin 10. Tom Wilkinson, second right, plays the Guardian's Ewen MacAskill in Snowden. Paddy Considine, right, with Colin Stinton in The Bourne Ultimatum

(PARISA TAGHIZADEH/PA)

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, whichever 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.