You can tell something is off in the first scene of Anna Kendrick’s feverishly good thriller, Woman of the Hour. Rodney, a photographer, is trying to get Sarah to open up as he takes her picture in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming, a mountain expanse in the background. When Rodney gets close to Sarah to help her relax, he grabs her throat, and she yanks herself away. In that moment, we feel the isolation of the setting and we hear Sarah’s heart beating. Rodney slowly keeps his gaze set on her, and we realize that Sarah has nowhere to run–we are not watching the beginnings of a chase but the killing of prey. Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour shifts the focus from our trained concentration on the killer to the victims, and it’s a lean, stunningly assured directorial debut.
The film zooms forward to the following year, 1978, and we are introduced to Kendrick’s Cheryl, an aspiring actress who cannot get the men behind the desk at auditions to take her seriously. In her first scene, two men talk about her as if she’s not even there, and when she balks at the idea of doing nudity, she knows she’s not getting a callback. When she returns home, Cheryl’s neighbor, played by Pete Holmes, stands in the hallway to block her way to her apartment. Hey, he’s a nice guy! He would never make any woman feel uncomfortable! Later, when she is expressing doubts that she can make it as an actress, Holmes’ character makes himself at home in her space when she is on the phone with her agent. Woman is not just a story of a serial killer but about how men, knowingly and unknowingly, take up room in a woman’s space.
Cheryl is reluctant to appear on The Dating Game from her manager’s advice (hey, it worked for Sally Field), but she agrees to be a contestant. Throughout her preparations and getting to the studio, we see how Rodney stalks and earns the trust of other young women before he brutally kills them (after he helps a woman move into her apartment, there is a startling shot of their struggle from her skylight that made the audience at my TIFF screening visibly jump).
The Dating Game is really an excuse for beautiful people to bounce misogynistic innuendos over the wall at one another to the “ohhhhs” and “ahhhhs” of the studio audience, but Cheryl finds a connection with bachelor number three. While Woman of the Hour doesn’t answer why serial killer Rodney Alcala wanted to appear on The Dating Game, it does provide us with an unbelievable amount of tension. Kendrick constructs a scene in the parking lot between Cheryl and Rodney after their show films that will take your breath away.
Kendrick has always been an actor who brings a strong point of view to her characters, but here we feel how she has to watch everything she says or how she moves her body with every interaction with a man. We see how men did not take women’s claims seriously then, and it echoes eerily to how some things haven’t changed. I have always gravitated toward Kendrick’s ferocious intelligence on screen (she doesn’t have to say anything for us to know she has a witty remark at the ready), and we see another shade to Kendrick’s prowess as someone whose uneasiness with a situation overtakes what she truly feels in the moment.
Daniel Zovatto, as Rodney, has, at first, a friendly face, and he hides himself behind his camera before making contact with a victim. There is a stillness in his movement that are most unsettling, though. Sometimes his smile slowly fade and you wonder if this man was genial at all in the first place–the way his energy and color evaporates from his face is remarkably sinister. There is a withheld vulnerability and intelligence that Rodney uses to twist and manipulate conversations, and audiences may remember Zovatto’s controlled intensity from Station Eleven.
Kendrick packs her film full of bright colors (whites, garish oranges, and artificial pinks and purples) of the time to juxtapose the darkness even more. What is presented on The Dating Game is a fantasy, an overly flirty game show where everyone has sex on their minds, but Kendrick never allows you to forget the danger behind that wall. The camera grows tighter on Cheryl as she gets closer to making her choice, and she zeros in on Rodney, too, before the game reaches its conclusion. Even though we are in a studio packed with people, we feel like we are back on that Wyoming cliff and Cheryl will have nowhere to run.
Woman of the Hour is a thoughtful, intelligently made thriller. It is a clear example of how a performer’s incisiveness, dark wit, and impeccable timing can lend itself to talent behind the camera.
Woman of the Hour has been acquired by Netflix. A release date has yet to be announced.
