‘Woman of the Hour’ and the Curse of the Time-Jumbled Narrative

As a polemic about the way society casually dismisses violence against women, Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut ‘Woman of the Hour,’ now streaming on Netflix, is extremely effective. If you want to know whether or not Kendrick knows how to frame a landscape, build tension in a scene, or coax nuanced performances out of actors, Woman of the Hour will answer all your questions. She can. But as a coherent narrative that tells a singular story, Woman of the Hour is less effective. This is more a fault of the screenplay than any particular directing choices. It jumps around in time too much and changes perspectives jarringly. This is not an anthology film, so it’s a big ask for your audience to grasp onto a half-dozen related storylines in a film that’s barely 90 minutes long.

WOMAN OF THE HOUR  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Anna Kendrick
Written by: Ian McDonald
Starring: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Zovatto, Autumn Best, Pete Holmes, Tony Hale
Running time: 95 mins

The hook for Woman of the Hour is based in fact. Cheryl Bradshaw, a struggling actress in Los Angeles, went on The Dating Game in 1978, where she matched with Rodney Alcala, one of the most sadistic and prolific serial killers in American history. The film doesn’t give us a clue as to how Alcala, who, by 1978, was an ex-con with a long history of suspicion and run-ins with the law, ever made it near the set, leaving us to assume that he slipped in because of some sort of institutional misogynistic bias. The true story of Alcala is actually much sadder, weirder, and more disgusting than this movie can even begin to tell, and Bradshaw was just a glossy footnote in his dark American saga.

Though The Dating Game episode and its aftermath take up the majority of the run time, the movie tries to fill in the blanks in Cheryl’s life, showing us her struggles to audition for a role, a scenario that recent movies like MaXXXine did more luridly and Licorice Pizza did more amusingly and affectionately. She also has a weak tryst with a neighbor, played by Pete Holmes, in her apartment building and is on the receiving end of everything but an ass-slapping from an unctuous game-show host played by Tony Hale. She doesn’t actually physically encounter Alcala until the film’s final third, and, spoiler alert, she emerges unscathed, at least in body.

Meanwhile, the film jumps around in time and location. We’re in Wyoming in 1978, Manhattan in 1971, and the San Gabriel Valley in 1979, the latter taking place after The Dating Game scenario. But in the world of Woman of the Hour, the narrative unfolds simultaneously. In these scenarios, we see Alcala’s crimes in horrifying and creepy detail. There’s also a flashback-y narrative involving a schoolteacher in The Dating Game audience who recognizes Alcala as the man who raped and murdered her friend after a beach party. We see her urgently trying to get the authorities to believe her story, but we’ve already seen Alcala free and preying on victims a year later, so it mutes the impact of her efforts, and just feels like wasted tension.

Daniel Zovatto gives a tremendously believable and creepy performance as Alcala. Kendrick plays Cheryl Bradshaw, and she’s perfectly good, though you never, at any moment, think you’re watching someone other than Anna Kendrick. Autumn Best is excellent as a runaway teenager who’s just street-smart enough to go toe-to-toe with a serial killer who “always gets the girl.” But because the story bounces around so much, you can never quite attach yourself to any one character–other than maybe Alcala himself–and it diminishes the sense of creeping dread that sets in whenever Rodney appears in frame with his stock-in-trade camera.

As serial-killer narratives go, this is not Seven, or Zodiac. It mercifully doesn’t go as graphic as indie serial-killer chic movies like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. “Serial killer on The Dating Game” could have been a source of comedy. Woman of the Hour doesn’t go there. It also could have been the source of tragedy. It doesn’t quite go there, either. In the end, it doesn’t exactly go anywhere, and just misses its true-crime target. But it does show that with a slightly better script, Anna Kendrick, director, could make quite an impact.