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Woman of the Hour Struggles to Find the Hook of its Limited Premise


In 1978, serial killer Rodney Alcala, in the midst of his murder spree unbeknownst to anyone, appeared on an episode of The Dating Game and even won that week’s show. Nothing more substantial came of it -the show’s bachelorette didn’t even go on the date he won; and all it did was make for a chilling detail in his story of brief public attention and get him labelled the Dating Game Killer. Curious though it is, it’s not enough on its own to warrant a whole movie about the incident. And you can tell that Woman of the Hour, the feature directing debut of Anna Kendrick, is reaching to try and justify itself with material it has to extrapolate or outright embellish to create dramatic tension.
Kudos to Kendrick though for the boldness of her choice of material -even if it is a bit of an odd fit for her. It’s clearly a stab at versatility both in tone and what the filmmaking requirements of that tone are for an actress who made her name on musicals and comedies. Woman of the Hour is very explicitly not a comedy, as it makes clear in a tension-filled opening sequence where an unsuspecting woman is having her photographs taken in the wide open desert by Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) some time before the event of the TV appearance.
In fact the movie is broken up by scenes like these of Alcala’s various murders through the years (though very deliberately only those of young women -the movie doesn’t dare touch on the children he abducted), as a way of artificially intensifying the main story, and the structure comes off as a slow-burn slasher film -though it never gets graphic beyond Alcala’s game of non-fatal strangulation. Meanwhile, Kendrick really tries to set up Cheryl Bradshaw as a protagonist, the woman who just happened to be on the other side of the wall during that curious game show. Far less is known of her, whom Kendrick plays as a struggling but highly dedicated actress who hasn’t actually dated in years, accepting the gig simply for the job and exposure.
Cheryl isn’t much of a character beyond an audience surrogate whom Kendrick plays to her typical comfort level, and for much of the film it’s difficult to manufacture any real conflict for her -as she doesn’t even come into contact with Alcala until late in the third act. Of the various ways Kendrick attempts to make up for this, the only one concerning Cheryl herself is some mild commentary on the nature of the show and its relationship to industry sexism epitomized in Tony Hale’s host. But this occurs only in dressing room scenes, and the life that Cheryl leads outside of the show is largely under-developed -such as the state of her career and relationship with her family and her friend Terry, played by Pete Holmes, with unrequited feelings for her. Kendrick does her job as actress, and endeavours to centre this woman as much as she can, but Kendrick the director is far more interested in Alcala, and other stories around him.
She keeps returning to scenes of his crimes and specifically one that takes place not long after, involving Alcala picking up a girl in the city and taking her into the desert to take photos of her -his usual ruse, and it not going quite the same way as his other abductions. It’s not a catharsis though, and more seems like Kendrick honing in on a rare case of one of his victims getting at least some modicum of justice. She cares very much about presenting a picture of women resistant to this figure of great violence against women, but it’s clear she is grasping at straws to make them fit a narrative without betraying the truth completely. Hence why a more dramatic confrontation is written between Cheryl and Alcala, and his victims are played as more wary than the record indicates. At every turn though, it feels fake -especially in the awkward ways the scenes around The Dating Game are manoeuvred into the story. And so much of the movie is tangibly written from a twenty-first century sensibility (dialogue too) and the benefit of hindsight. The most distracting manufactured subplot in this regard concerns a woman in the audience Laura (Nicolette Robinson) who recognises Alcala as someone who had been seen with a friend of hers before she disappeared. She attempts to alert various authorities, from a security guard to a producer who ghosts her, and of course is not allowed by the narrative to get anywhere with it.
All these to pad out the curious though tension-less game show segments (in one scene, Alcala vaguely threatens one of his fellow candidates, but no real danger is translated). I don’t know what the actual episode was like, but it plays out very artificially here, with both of the other contestants so profoundly incompetent walking clichés that Alcala gets to be the winner by default (I suspect this was done to avoid the movie having to suggest in any way that Alcala could be genuinely charming). Cheryl is given an artificial degree of agency as well in sizing up the men behind the wall, and the game show segments just generally fail to really sell anything but the novelty of the incident.
Kendrick in her capacity as director understands that the canvas needs to be larger than the show, but in the need to centre the show, the film on the whole just feels more awkward in its digressions -to the point its ending is in a completely different storyline that Cheryl has nothing to do with -again for some mild effort at closure. But Kendrick is interested by the material, if she is less inclined towards its darkest contours -that said, in some sides of Alcala’s violence she is more direct than expected. Her filmmaking however never rises above basic competence, and she doesn’t find a clever way to tackle the regrettably poor script that feels entirely ill-at-ease for the context and tone.
There may have been a way to make the story of this infamous Dating Game appearance interesting in its own right, but this movie does not find it. It expands its scope but retains focus, such that it can, on the victimised women; yet that only makes the result more scattershot and unwieldy. And you don’t come away knowing all that much about either Alcala and the scale of his horrors or his victims. You can sometimes tell a lot about the success of a biographical film based on how much post-movie text it employs, and Woman of the Hour features a lot of post-movie text. Ultimately it ends on the same sentiment for the audience that it begins on: it’s wild that a serial killer appeared on The Dating Game! And nothing more.

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