TIFF23: "Woman of the Hour" - Film Review
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Woman of the Hour wouldn’t exist.
Patricia Arquette’s Gonzo Girl isn’t the only first directorial outing from an actress to premiere at TIFF this year. Woman of the Hour marks the directorial debut of Anna Kendrick. It’s a natural progression from her early deadpan comedic roles to the smaller, independent drama films she’s made lately. Woman of the Hour is somewhere in between. The film, which Kendrick also stars in, has great moments of comedy balanced by a dark, disturbing underbelly.
Woman of the Hour is based on the true story of a serial killer who appeared on The Dating Game while he was actively murdering women. It’s one of those stories that would be rejected by Hollywood executives if it weren’t true. In 1978, Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) was a mystery bachelor on The Dating Game and was described as a photographer when he was introduced. The premise of the show is that one woman, Cheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) in this case, sits on one side of the stage. Three men are hidden behind a partition on the other side. The bachelorette can ask them questions about anything except their appearance. Cheryl chose Rodney as the winner, but didn’t follow through with a date because she found something about him unsettling when they met without the partition.
It’s not surprising that Woman of the Hour exists at this moment in time. True crime is incredibly popular in pop culture, and it’s a little surprising that Netflix hadn’t made a docuseries about Rodney yet. The true crime genre leaves many viewers with a strange, uncertain feeling. It takes a deft hand to make a film about real-life, brutal murders that doesn’t skew toward exploitative. For the most part, Woman of the Hour doesn’t make viewers feel that trauma is being manipulated for entertainment value. Much of the violence happens off screen, with only snippets of the struggle shown to audiences. This creates a feeling of trust between the audience and the film, as though the movie is promising to offer something more than just violent murder. In fact, Zovatto does such a great job of being manipulative, charming, and creepy that the audience doesn’t even need to see the glimpses of violence to understand what this man is capable of.
The film jumps around to a few different years in the late 1970s. Rodney lived in Wyoming, New York, Washington, and California. He committed a series of murders in each of those states, and Woman of the Hour bounces between the locations and the years throughout the live taping of The Dating Game. The timeline is a little difficult to keep up with, especially because the action rarely returns to these deviations, since they usually end in the death of a woman. Their purpose seems to exist so that the film can include the woman who is partially responsible for Rodney being arrested. Her story starts like all the others with Rodney charming a woman and asking if he can photograph her. In the film’s version of the events, a young hitchhiker (Autumn Best) escapes from Rodney after she was assaulted and calls the police, who handcuff Rodney on the spot. It seems as though this character is based on Monique Hoyt, but it’s unclear what really happened.
Kendirck may not have figured out a distinct directorial style yet, but Woman of the Hour doesn’t suffer from the traps that many first-time directors stumble into. Her acting is what stands out most in this film. She’s good at using the smallest facial movement to say so much and her feet feel firmly planted on the ground. In the case of Woman of the Hour, she’s playing a character that might hit close to home. Cheryl is an aspiring actor who has been living in LA for years, but hasn’t booked any meaningful roles yet. She’s ready to give up, but her agent offers her the spot on The Dating Game because it would be good for exposure. The film includes a smattering of critiques about the world of Hollywood and the way women were treated in the ’70s. It’s disappointing to see how relevant these critiques still are today.
Woman of the Hour is one of the better creations to come out of the true-crime wave. The runtime keeps the semi-confusing timeline in check, and the central Dating Game sequence is not overmilked. Woman of the Hour understands that it needs the truth of The Dating Game appearance to illuminate its thoughts on masculinity and womanhood, and the intersection of these two ideas in the world of dating. It’s an intriguing first outing from director Kendrick, as well as a clear showcase of her talents in front of the camera.
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