A serial killer taking part in a game show sounds like a nasty joke dreamt up in a true-crime podcast studio. Anna Kendrick’s lucid, precise debut feature Woman Of The Hour revisits the stranger-than-fiction real-life events which saw Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), in the midst of a murder spree, appear on The Dating Game in 1978. It’s a story that initially incorporates the scuzzy hamster wheel of television production, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the mind games and dangerous precision with which Alcala toys with perception and trust.
More a social commentary than a pulpy thriller, the film spends longer listening to the women who were long ignored — those who suspected him, those who trusted him, those who reported him — than ogling his crimes. You don’t need to see evil inflicted on a woman to feel her suffering. Kendrick plays actor/fellow contestant Sheryl Bradshaw with a precise focus and determination she’s rarely been allowed in the peppier roles of her career — Pitch Perfect, this is not. In Woman Of The Hour, you’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, but somewhat relieved when you don’t have to see it happen.
It’s compelling the longer it sits with you.
As Alcala, meanwhile, Zovatto is not quite as convincing, having less impact than you would hope. But that may well be the point — he lacks the twisted charisma of, say, Zac Efron as Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile, but this is less a film about the murderous man, more a tribute to those he took from us.
As a director, Kendrick displays wisdom in walking the knife’s edge between the thrill of being seen and the danger of being watched. It’s compelling the longer it sits with you — less engrossing than a schlocky genre film, and perhaps slightly more anticlimactic as a result, but you never doubt its intelligence.
