Directed by Anna Kendrick | Written by Ian McDonald | 95 min | ▲▲▲▲▲ | Netflix
A capsule review of this film appeared on FITI in September during #TIFF23
Woman Of The Hour tells the true story of Rodney Alcara (Daniel Zovatto, intensely creepy). An American serial killer, he murdered a number of women in the 1970s — the total number is unclear, but it could be more than a hundred. He felt so cocky that at one time he was even a bachelor on The Dating Game TV show looking for his next victim.
Though the gameshow is the centrepiece of the film, the picture uses a non-linear chronology to show Alcara’s activities in Wisconsin and California in 1977 and ’79. He was on The Dating Game in 1978.
Kendrick also appears in the film as The Dating Game bachelorette, Sheryl Bradshaw, as we cut back and forth in time, when Alcara encountered other women played by Nicolette Robinson, Kathryn Gallagher, and Kelley Jakle. Autumn Best is especially good as a victim who does something Alcara wasn’t expecting.
Kendrick’s first film as a director is a grim, tension-builder, and her confidence with the elements that make a successful thriller is next level. It’s not just in the camerawork, the editing, and the performances, it’s the thematic concerns. Her film shows the freedom this man had to terrorize, assault, and murder women in a brutally misogynist culture, and Kendrick makes the entertainment industry absolutely complicit in this impunity — it’s not hard to draw connections to today’s unaccountably popular and sexist reality TV biz.
This is the rare serial killer movie that never shifts its perspective away from the women dealing with the violence — in that regard it shares a lot of storytelling DNA with Silence of the Lambs.
Well-shot and well-acted by a young cast, I’ve seen the film twice and its dark power seemed even more acute the second time around. With this and the Ontario-made Alice, Darling, Kendrick is using her career to take close looks at men’s violence toward women. It’s a sadly rich storytelling vein.
