Kendrick shows real potential as a director
Let’s start off by exposing what some might consider an embarrassing gap in my knowledge: I had never heard of the serial killer Rodney Alcala, the primary subject of Woman of the Hour. Indeed, the movie doesn’t even preface its events with a ‘based on true events’ tag, or anything like that.
So, for the entirety of this movie’s runtime, I was under the impression that was an entirely original work of fiction (which certainly some of it is). What can I say? I just don’t like knowing too much about a movie before watching it.
It doesn’t matter, though. I’m no expert on the subject matter, and when it comes to films based on real events, I don’t care how accurate they are so long as they tell an engaging story. I do wonder if I would’ve had a different reaction to Woman of the Hour if I’d known about the basis for the story—or even that it was based on real events.
Perhaps I would've been more forgiving.
The Waiting Game
Cheryl (Anna Kendrick) is a struggling actress whose agent books her a spot on the game show The Dating Game. Unbeknownst to her, Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) is a serial killer who appears as one of the bachelor contestants on Cheryl’s episode. Forced to choose a man to ‘date’, Cheryl could be one bad decision away from the end of her life.
That is, in essence, the hook of Woman of the Hour, but the narrative is a lot more disjointed than my logline makes it out to be. The story jumps forwards and backwards across years as it depicts several of Rodney’s murders. The purpose is, of course, to use dramatic irony to convey the level of danger that Cheryl finds herself in, but I’m not sure this was the best way to do it.
The cold open is great, though. It sets the tone for the movie, tell us who Rodney is, and really puts us in the shoes of one of his victims. I’d argue that’s all we needed. Instead, Cheryl’s story is interrupted again and again to depict the lead-up and execution of some of his other murders, and the movie starts spinning its wheels.
Creep Show
I guess the problem is that Cheryl’s story isn’t all that compelling (for the most part; we’ll get to the good stuff soon). Obviously, the situation she found herself in is interesting, but she's kind of a blank slate. The writers attempted to give her some personal life issues—she can’t pay her rent, she has a weird neighbour—but it wasn’t enough.
I understand the urge to avoid fabricating too much when writing a ‘character’ like Cheryl, who is a real person, but I was really missing a deeper motivation for some of her decisions that might’ve been solved with a decent backstory. Her status as protagonist is also split by the movie’s focus on Laura (Nicolette Robinson), an audience member who recognises Rodney.
Laura is a little thin on character, but she is an active force in the story and gives the audience something to root for when Cheryl is on stage and effectively contributing nothing to the plot. The idea of being in the audience for a game show and you have to convince people that one of the contestants of the show might be a serial killer is a great concept. I could’ve watched a whole movie about that.
Daniel Zovatto as Rodney Alcala also does a great job at balancing the friendly/menacing dynamic in his character that makes Alcala such an intriguing yet macabre figure. He inhabits a deeply broken psychology in a realistic manner that makes me wish we got to see him play the character on Mindhunter (R.I.P Mindhunter).
The Nice Guys
While I wasn’t sold on much of Woman of the Hour, there are a few elements of it that make it worth watching. First, it’s a great exploration of the sense of danger that follows women everywhere they go. Rodney is disarmingly charming and seemingly unthreatening. In fact, he actually seems to like many of the women he ends up killing—that is, until they wind up inadvertently bruising his very fragile ego.
It’s something that was touched in the recent Strange Darling, too. Ostensible ‘Nice Guys’ and even men that women have known for years can harbour a vile, even murderous, other side that can be revealed in an instant. You see stories about this on the internet all the time, and there’s something very compelling about watching this kind of relationship play out on-screen.
There are also two truly great scenes in this movie. I won’t get into detail, as they’re in the back half the movie, but both are about women in danger. They’re tense as hell, and really conveyed Kendrick’s talent behind the camera. She gives a great performance too, might I add, imbuing Cheryl with a light, devilish intelligence that buoys the character enough to be watchable.
There are moments of great ingenuity in Woman of the Hour, and I hope to see more from Kendrick as a director, but overall I struggled to engage with the repetition in the out-of-sequence plot and the main character lacked the kind of depth that would've otherwise had me leaning in. Although, for a ninety-minute Netflix movie, you could do a lot worse.
Thanks for reading my review. If you liked it, consider checking out my wishlist or buying me a cup of coffee at https://ko-fi.com/kieranobrien or below.
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