It’s time to make a decision!
Main Cast: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Zovatto
Director: Anna Kendrick
Let’s face it: The Dating Game was always creepy. It was always a bad idea. It was always exploitation. Giving a young woman a series of sexually suggestive questions to read aloud to three strangers, one of whom she was expected to take a romantic trip with after 30 minutes of televised stupidity, was not smart.
The real miracle is that these women did not regularly end up dead.
But that doesn’t mean they weren’t in danger. Woman of the Hour tells the story of the most infamous case of inadequate vetting (that we know of) in the show’s history. Sheryl Bradshaw (Anna Kendrick) is a struggling actress whose agent convinces her to appear on The Dating Game. It will give her exposure, she is told. The year is 1978.
Already reluctant to participate, Sheryl is uncomfortable with the double-entendre filled questions. She would undoubtedly have been even more uncomfortable had she known that one of her “bachelors” was Rodney Alcala (played by Daniel Zovatto), a serial killer who at that time had been raping and murdering women and children for at least a decade.
While the Dating Game appearance is at the center of Woman of the Hour, the movie is really about Alcala. We meet him in scenarios both before and after the program. He chooses vulnerable victims and is just charming enough to exploit their weaknesses.
Woman of the Hour is Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut and she absolutely nails it. Sheryl’s frustrating and traumatic experience in the openly sexist Hollywood of the 1970s hits home hard nearly 50 years later. We would love to think we’ve come a long way, baby, but we haven’t. I don’t know if that message is intentional, but it’s clear as we watch these events play out that they could happen just as easily today as they did back in the age of the leisure suit.
Kendrick plays Sheryl as annoyed but realistic. She wants a career so she mostly puts up with the bullshit. But she’s also smart and there is a limit to what she will tolerate. Every woman who watches Woman of the Hour will see herself in at least one scene, when Sheryl or another woman needs to protect herself from a dangerous man without making a “scene”.
Daniel Zovatto is phenomenal as Rodney Alcala. He’s pathetic and manipulative and a violent psychopath. The best moments of the entire film are when the women see behind his mask. Zovatto’s changes in expression and behavior are small and subtle and the dawning realization from the women involved feels terribly real.
The supporting cast doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but every one of them adds to the cumulative effect of the movie. Particularly great are the women who watch out for each other, passing along helpful advice and warnings. Tony Hale gets a special shout-out as the smarmy host of The Dating Game. He plays this sad, shitty man with gusto.
Woman of the Hour is horrifying, but it isn’t a horror movie. It’s a thriller without gratuitous gore or violence. Much takes place off-camera, we don’t need to see or hear it to know what’s happening.
Kendrick keeps the story tight and the tension high. The atmosphere around Alcala is cloyingly creepy—he is a scary dude. Sometimes he can control it, but the rot in there has a way of seeping out for others to see. 95 minutes flies by without a single bloated scene or unnecessary conversation.
The locations flip between tight and claustrophobic and gorgeously isolated and desolate. The juxtaposition is used to keep the film moving, with scene changes acting like chapters in a book you can’t put down.
I didn’t know what to expect from Woman of the Hour, but I certainly didn’t expect the little masterpiece I got. The movie is taught and terrifying with great performances from the entire cast. Never veering into the realm of exploitive docudrama, Woman of the Hour tells its story without flinching. A fantastic outing for Kendrick—I can’t wait to see what she does next.
(You can find clips and episodes of the original Dating Game on YouTube)
Sue reads a lot, writes a lot, edits a lot, and loves a good craft. She was deemed “too picky” to proofread her children’s school papers and wears this as a badge of honor. She is also proud of her aggressively average knitting skills She is the Editorial Director at Silver Beacon Marketing and an aspiring Crazy Cat Lady.
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