'Woman of the Hour' Tries to Avoid Serial Killer Tropes, Mostly Successfully
Anna Kendrick makes her directorial debut on Netflix, with an interesting riff on true crime and serial killers.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
—
Serial killers, at least the non-fictional ones, make for great podcast fodder, but they can be a heavy lift for screenwriters. There’ve been probably dozens of documentaries with a “serial killer tells all!” hook, and none of them have been especially memorable — probably because serial killing isn’t some special knack for mayhem inside a person, more a sign of basic brokenness. We search and search for something interesting, but it’s just not there. If they had any special insight to share about themselves they probably wouldn’t be serial killers. It’s like sitting in front of a broken clock asking it why it doesn’t tell time. The banality of evil and all of that.
Usually we have to invent fake serial killers to give them the kind of coherent motivations and cosmic symmetry that make fiction interesting. Woman of the Hour, Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, from a script by Ian McDonald, is a based-on-a-true-story, real-life serial killer tale that’s trying hard not to be about the serial killer. In this case, Rodney Alcala, the so-called Dating Game Killer, played with excellent dead-eyed fuckboi ick by Daniel Zovatto.
Instead it makes heroes of two women who got away, mostly the titular “woman of the hour,” Cheryl Bradshaw (played by Kendrick) the struggling actress who starred opposite Alcala on The Dating Game. Bradshaw chose Alcala over the other two bachelors, met him after the show, and then never went on the date because he skeeved her out so much. The focus on this particular event positions Woman of the Hour as a simultaneous triumph of trusting your instincts, and a comment on the dearth of choices Bradshaw had available. Somehow a serial killer seemed like the best option, radiating so much obvious menace that he never even made it to the first date. Tough times!
These are indeed more interesting angles than the usual “what the hell is wrong with this guy” (or God forbid, “isn’t this guy creepy and cool”) serial killer narratives. The framing is smart, though Woman of the Hour’s main drawbacks are that, for a triumph, that triumph is a little muted, and most of its commentary on 1970s society is limited to the accurate but well-worn Margaret Atwood quote, “men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
In the climactic scene, when Bradshaw hijacks The Dating Game to ask the kind of questions she really wants to and not the corny double entendre bait on the cue cards, one of the show’s makeup artists congratulates her. “Hon, I’ve been working on this show for years, and the question behind the question is always the same: ‘Are you going to hurt me?’”
(In real life, Bradshaw asked Alcala questions like, “I’m serving you for dinner. What are you called and what do you look like?” To which Alcala responded “I’m called the banana and I look good.” “Can you be a little more descriptive?” Bradshaw asked Alcala. “Peel me.” Actual seventies television is maybe too shitty, even for a movie about how shitty seventies television was.)
Woman of the Hour plays like a collision course, depicting Alcala and Bradshaw’s very different journeys to The Dating Game. Bradshaw is an aspiring actress, trying to put to use her BFA in acting from Columbia, seemingly to increasingly diminishing returns in the superficial moron’s paradise of the late-seventies entertainment industry. She tries her best to smile and giggle her way through auditions for Beach Bimbo #4 while male gatekeepers tell her things like “NYU, you said? That’s a good program,” and “what’s your cup size? Do you do nudity?”
Meanwhile, she only has one friend in LA, another aspiring actor (played by Pete Holmes, who visibly winces when she calls him “friend”), who, wouldn’t you know it, actually wants to have sex with her. America Ferrara wasn’t lyin’, being a woman is hard.
In the other storyline, Rodney Alcala, a camera-toting pseudo-photographer/filmmaker who tells women things like “you could be a model” and “I studied with Roman Polanksi” (both, yes, real anecdotes, including that Alcala wasn’t lying about a class he took with Polanski at UCLA), sort of drifts around the country murdering women. It’s an Alcala murder that opens the film, which is perhaps a mistake, if the goal was, as it seems to be, avoiding serial killer tropes.
Woman of the Hour depicts only a fraction of Alcala’s actual crimes, making up for what it lacks in quantity with graphic detail. In the opening scene, Alcala, with his soft brown eyes and artist’s mane, listens to a young woman’s tearful tale of a recent breakup with faux sensitivity, before chasing her down and choking her to death on a Wyoming hilltop. Later, a Manhattan flight attendant’s asshole movers just drop all her stuff off on the street, in the rain (men! aren’t they just the worst?). She sees a guy with a camera hanging out on the street at the time, and, lacking any better options, asks for his help getting her stuff upstairs. Alcala ends up garroting her with her own nylons.
As a comment on widespread misogyny, Woman of the Hour isn’t exactly about how Alcala inevitably “gets taken down.” Yet as a serial killer story, it can’t quite escape the cultural inertia of that structure even as it makes some notable attempts to avoid it. There are three women who function as the heroes of the story: Bradshaw, who gets by far the most time; Amy, a teenage runaway played by Autumn Best* who escapes Alcala before he can kill her; and Laura (Nicolette Robinson) a woman sitting in the studio audience for The Dating Game taping who recognizes Alcala as the man who murdered her friend years earlier.
Of the three, only Amy has an active hand in Alcala’s arrest. Bradshaw at least saved herself, but of the three, the film’s inclusion of Laura (presumably a composite character, I haven’t read The Dating Game Killer but I don’t imagine it happened quite this way) seems the most questionable. Laura steels herself through a panic attack (my least favorite choice in the movie) to try to get anyone to listen about who this man is, but whether anyone actually did is left ambiguous. In the end, the epilogue text, about how Alcala killed two more women, one of them a 12-year-old girl, while out on bail is more powerful than Laura’s storyline, which mostly echoes themes done better elsewhere in the movie.
In fact, Alcala is notable in the pantheon of serial killers mostly for how many times he was able to offend and re-offend even after he’d seemingly been caught red-handed.