‘Woman Of The Hour’ Review: Anna Kendrick’s “Dating Game Killer” Drama Is An Impressive Directorial Debut [TIFF]

Anna Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour” begins at a remote photo shoot in Wyoming circa 1977. The model finds herself talking about how she wound up living there, and as she does, she starts to cry. The photographer, the only other person there, tries to comfort her.

“Just keep talking, okay?” he pleads, tapping his heart. What a sensitive guy! So she tells him her sad story (between apologies for doing so), and then, at that moment of complete vulnerability, he puts his hand around her throat. Once he’s choked the breath out of her, he giver her mouth to mouth, bringing her back to life so he can kill her again. Cut to black.

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It’s a hell of an opening, the kind of thing that heralds the appearance of a major filmmaker, which is exactly what Kendrick proceeds to prove. But her command of mood and technique is present from the jump, as well as her clarity about the kind of director she wants to be. She doesn’t linger on the grisly details; there are a couple of quick close-ups, but the attack is seen primarily in long shots or heard off-camera. This feels consistent with the subtle shift of perspective in true crime as of late, in how docuseries like “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” and “Last Call” have taken pains to center their victims rather than romanticizing their perpetrators. 

The perpetrator here is Rodney James Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), the photographer, rapist, and murderer best remembered, in the shorthand of true crime, as the “Dating Game Killer” for his appearance as one of the bachelor contestants on that tacky game show in 1978— right in the middle of his killing spree. But the focus is primarily on the bachelorette he courted on that show, Cheryl Bradshaw, played by Kendrick and slightly renamed “Sheryl” for fictionalization purposes. Sheryl is an actor, first seen at an audition where the filmmakers appraise her looks right in front of her; when she says she’s not okay with the nudity the role requires, one tries to comfort her: “I’m sure they’re fine.”

Most of her auditions are going about that well, so Sheryl’s agent books her on “The Dating Game,” assuring her it’s good exposure. “Sally Field was on the show,” Sheryl tries to reassure herself, but they’re not looking for another Sally; “When you get on that stage, I don’t want you to play so smart,” says host Ed Burke (name changed from the show’s actual host, Jim Lange), played by Tony Hale with the just the right mixture of sleaze and boredom.

Ian McDonald’s taut screenplay hopscotches Alcala’s timeline — jumping ahead to his attempt to prey on a teenage runaway the following year and back to an earlier murder in New York City circa 1971. The grisliness of that opening effectively builds dread into everything with him that follows; it also neatly subverts our narrative expectations, since, even when an audience member (Nicolette Robinson) recognizes him as the creep who she saw with her girlfriend right before she was killed, we know there won’t be an easy payoff. (“It’s a big TV show; you don’t think they vet the contestants?” asks her disbelieving boyfriend.) But points are made—the “Dating Game” make-up lady offhandedly notes that all of the questions the bachelorette asks of the bachelors essentially boil down to, “Which one of you won’t hurt me?”

Kendrick leans more into the dark comedy and general dread of the situation, winding the picture tighter the deeper she goes, and her work here is ambitious and impressive. The only serious flaw is how McDonald’s script plays too fast and loose with the facts—the story of Alcala’s eventual arrest and the infuriating information conveyed via on-screen text about what happened after, appear to have been manufactured out of whole cloth, which is a pretty cheap way to play your audience in the home stretch. 

Supporting performances are uniformly solid, especially Autumn Best as the runaway—there’s a whole life of survivor’s experience in the way her eyes go dead during a long car ride. Already an eerie stand-out in HBO Max’s “Station Eleven,” Zovatto is equally chilling as Alcara, all long hair, name-dropping, and barely suppressed rage (watch the way he tells the other bachelors, “I always get the girl”), a performance of supreme, yet assumed command. And Kendrick’s own performance is quite good, in the ways her work always is, present and sharp-edged and instantly credible. Her acting and the film itself feel very much of a piece with “Alice Darling,” the indie drama she starred in and produced last year, particularly in its laser focus on the tiny concessions women make, all day and every day, to men and their fragile feelings. (In one early, heartbreaking scene, she apologizes after her neighbor guy makes a pass, then feels bad for it, making it awkward, so she sleeps with him.) 

“Woman of the Hour” is well-paced, moving like a bullet through its 89-minute running time. The soundtrack thankfully avoids the same tired repository of ’70s needle drops, and the murder sequences, while studiously avoiding exploitation, pack in some legitimately upsetting imagery. And Kendrick’s displays of form are genuinely inventive—note how she takes out all the natural sound in the bar when their post-show date goes sideways, creating a thick silence that Sheryl feels obligated to fill (often with apologies and self-deprecation). 

It’s not hard to spot her influences here: the look and feel of the opening sequence recalls “Zodiac,” the behind-the-scenes-at-a-game-show material is reminiscent of similar scenes in “Magnolia,” and the gripping staging and cutting of her last scene with Alcara feels like something out of one of De Palma’s urban thrillers. But the film this one most brings to mind is her “Up In The Air” co-star George Clooney’s “Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind,” and not just because of the “Dating Game” crossover. It’s because this, too, is the debut feature of an intelligent, intuitive, film-literate actor-turned-director who has clearly spent their career working, watching, and taking notes. [B+] 

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