Netflix’s latest true crime offering is mercifully snappy at a feature-length 94 minutes compared to the streamer’s usual eight-part miniseries fare, but it still proves the genre is skating on thin ice.
Consumers’ obsession with serial killers, sparked by David Fincher’s Zodiac and compounded by podcasts and documentaries galore, is smartly observed by first-time filmmaker Anna Kendrick, exploring a real-life instance of Rodney Alcala’s appearance on the popular game show The Dating Game. It’s a chilling parallel to how contemporary media has made strange bedfellows with these real and fictional killers, but Woman of the Hour is at its most effective outside of the TV studio.
The Pitch Perfect star leads the cast as Cheryl Bradshaw, a real aspiring actress who landed a spot on the show and ended up picking Alcala out of a line-up of three bachelors to go out with in 1978. Her narrative of chasing stardom is given a palpable sense of quiet dread as it plays out sliced with scenes of her date’s brutal killings of various young women.
While these sequences are truly blood-curdling, Kendrick’s segments feel more like interruptions to the narrative rather than the crux, as she clearly felt beholden to honour and flesh out Alcala’s victims beyond the corpses and screams that have historically been on display.
Cheryl deftly swerving well-trodden everyday sexism and microaggressions feels not insignificant but rather weightless compared to the urgently upsetting vignettes following a cold-blooded killer and his victims.
There’s some chilling commentary to be made about the lengths male sociopathy and artificial charisma will get them, but the first-time director’s care to flesh out the stories of slain women makes the game show skeleton feel more like a piece of trivia, a distraction to the real meat of the story.
An admittedly chilling encounter with the deranged stalker in a car park wrapping up Cheryl’s story is rather pedestrian compared to the film’s most compelling throughline, young newcomer Autumn Best as teenage runaway Amy (based on Monique Hoyt), who briefly falls under Alcala’s spell.
Best is a clear star in the making – although she has no scenes opposite Kendrick, she arrives as Woman of the Hour’s most self-assured cast member, wryly holding her own with Daniel Zovatto’s eerily soft-spoken Alcala. Perhaps intentionally, Kendrick is simply her usual peppy self and delivers a serviceable leading turn, focusing her efforts on directing a magnetic performance from Best.
It’s here that “victimhood” is at its most challenged and confronted, a portraiture of society’s most cast aside encountering pure evil and emerging virtuous and trusting, resourceful yet complicated. Broadway star Kathryn Gallagher delivers a similarly showstopping performance as an endearing woman who makes the simple mistake of asking Alcala’s help to move her furniture.
Scenes back in the studio therefore feel rather frustrating, only serving to prove how alluring the serial killer can be, with yet another distracting aside with Nicolette Robinson’s Laura, who had a previous encounter with Alcala, struggling to hold the authorities and TV producers’ feet to the fire.
It’s timely and vital, sure, but seems to serve mainly as a justification to deliver contemporaneous themes and ideas on a platform still at the whims of crime buffs demanding grisly kills and scares.
Thus, this framework only serves to demonstrate the limitations of the true crime drama rather than move it forward. If we really need a hook or gimmick to justify recreating the heinous crimes committed by monstrous men, should they really be shown at all?
Yes, certain moments make for gripping and, by its climax, cathartic viewing, but Woman of the Hour feels destined to be lost in the already endless back-catalogue of modern serial killer biopics and (hopefully) Kendrick’s stronger future endeavours.
Woman of the Hour will be released Friday, October 18 on Netflix.
