Let’s take a look at Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, and see how she manages this true story that reads like a late period M. Night Shyamalan plot concept.
They say that truth is stranger than fiction. The plot of Netflix’s new thriller, Woman of the Hour, is related to real-life events that seem like a hard-to-believe high concept for a horror film. Rodney Alcala was a serial killer who was active for a decade (eight confirmed kills but estimates of up to 130 in total) before appearing on the kitschy seventies game show, “The Dating Game”. Beloved actress and first-time director, Anna Kendrick, tackles this story in a way that makes it an interesting companion piece to the last film I reviewed, Maxxxine, and yet they couldn’t be much further from each other in terms of tone or content. Woman of the Hour explores how women have historically had to walk on eggshells around men for a chance at advancement and for their own safety, especially in the seventies, especially especially in the entertainment industry. Yet while Maxxxine tackles similar themes with blood splatter, decapitations, and testicle smashing, Kendrick and writer Ian McDonald take a different, more nuanced tack.
The film centers on Kendrick as an aspiring actress in the late seventies who is just one more humiliating audition away from giving up on her dreams. Her agent books her on “The Dating Game”, which is its own level of humiliation to Kendrick’s character, but at least it pays. We also get scenes centered on Daniel Zovatto as Alcala, a long-haired photographer who uses his quiet charm to put his victims at ease before driving them out to the coastal plains to sexually assault and kill them. I’m a big fan of Kendrick, and her performance here is unsurprisingly very good. I’ve not seen Zovatto before, but he was also excellent as Alcala. He plays him with a quiet intensity that reminds me of Vincent D’Onofrio, and the performance illuminates the mix of charisma, arrogance, and insecurity that has curdled into a terrible type of evil at his core. The two of them have limited screen time together, but those scenes are when the movie is at its best. The game show is the first one, and it is a lot of fun. During the taping, Kendrick’s character goes off script and stumps two of the bachelors by simply asking them questions that are not solely focused on her own objectification, which is a reversal of the show’s typical approach. Zovatto comes off like the world’s most progressive feminist by comparison, which is delicious irony for us as viewers given what we know about him at that point. Their other couple of scenes follow the taping, as the two of them go on an impromptu date, and Kendrick slowly comes to realize that he is just like the others, and then that he is much worse than the others. The pair generate a ton of tension as Kendrick tries to tactfully extract herself from the situation without angering Zovatto, a skill she has refined over her entire life, regardless of whether there is typically an actual serial killer on the other side of the exchange.
I quite liked Woman of the Hour, but I do think it has its flaws. Everything on screen – the acting, the set design, the direction – is solid. Any issues seem to be conceptual, stemming from the script-writing, or even pre-scripting stage. The film’s plotting is very ambitious, jumping around the seventies to follow Alcala through several of his murder attempts, most of them successful, a couple notably thwarted. That is given about equal time to Kendrick’s plotline, in which she parlays her Dating Game appearance into the chance to take back a little agency in her life. The problem with that structure is that I can’t tell who’s story is being told, and neither of them is told perhaps as effectively as if one or the other had been chosen to be the focus. In the story of Alcala, the game show appearance and his interaction with Kendrick’s character is really not very important. The ultimate resolution of said story, and the characters involved, get somewhat short shrift in this movie, even though the actual events are very compelling. Similarly, all of the rest of Alcala’s would-be victims feel slightly underserved. Yet, I understand why the movie makes so much room for the Kendrick/Dating Game stuff – She’s the film’s biggest star, and that is the plot hook that will compel people to click when they see the thumbnail pop up on their home screen. All of the marketing for the movie is centered around the game show aspect, and it is treated inside the film as the centerpiece around which everything else must fit. It’s just that, narratively, I don’t know that it should occupy that slot unless you more explicitly make the movie about Kendrick. The end result is a well-made film that never fails to capture your interest, but one that feels a bit abrupt and off-balance throughout the third act.
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