If you’re going only on David Fincher’s Zodiac, the 1970s were a time when creepy serial killers lurked around every corner, likely to approach you in broad daylight and kill you just for sport. If you’re adding Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour to the equation, the 70s were also a time when victims in general, and women in particular, were believed even less than they are today. The latter is likely more the inspiration for the actress’ directing debut than the former, but the genre juice of the serial killer movie probably also held some sway over her.

Rodney Alcala is not a household name when it comes to serial killers, even though he accumulated a body count estimated as high as 130 – far exceeding the tallies of better known American serial killers John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Less than a dozen of these have been formally tied to him, and the larger figure is derived in part from the photos of mostly young women that he kept in a portfolio – women who went missing but whose bodies were never found.

See, Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) approaches young women with the charm of a dreamy mystic left over from the 1960s, eager to demonstrate the ways he deviates from the other men who would hit on them. He successfully peddles the notion that he sees their souls, and his everpresent camera is just his way of embodying that soul in print. Since he’s targeting women at their low points – runaways, those freshly abandoned by their partners – his shtick perfectly catches them at a moment of peak vulnerability and suggestibility. Before they’ve had the chance to recompute their circumstances, and wonder if this is really a shoot by a renowned photographer, he’s strangling them to death in the desert.

That same charm, it seems, also works on game show producers. In the midst of one particular spree, Alcala got himself cast as one of the three bachelors on the hit TV show The Dating Game. The bachelorette is one Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick), an actress in the process of being chewed up and spat out by late 1970s Hollywood, whose agent booked her on the show as a desperate attempt to get her seen before Sheryl packs up and moves home. Sheryl has already had a bad experience with her neighbour (Pete Holmes), who thought running lines with her was reason enough to guilt her into sleeping with him. But Rodney Alcala seems like the antidote to the men she’s met in Hollywood, and particularly the other men on the game show, whose good looks and thoughtful answers belie something a lot more sinister.

Kendrick has been around directors for a career that goes back 20 years, and she’s been emboldened by that exposure to tackle something tricky right out of the box. From very early on this narrative has a shuffled quality, as it jumps around in the 1970s while also coming back to its core 1978 time period. The other unusual aspect to Ian McDonald’s script is that it introduces a new co-protagonist about halfway through the film, when we meet Laura (Nicolette Robinson), a member of the Dating Game audience who thinks she might have had a previous experience with Alcala.

In lesser hands these choices would be disorienting. Here they feel invigorating. Kendrick is essentially presenting us a tableau of past, current and potential future victims, their interchangeability and disposability presented ironically in both the title of the film and, one supposes, in Rodney Alcala’s mind. But it’s not just Alacala with the “same runaway, different day” mentality, as it’s clear that the other men in Woman of the Hour – not all, but most – are equally dismissive of a woman and her “complaints.” Tony Hale, the most recognisable cast member not named Anna Kendrick, is insidious as the game show host, who clearly has nothing but loathing for Sheryl and anyone else who sits in her chair.

The most insidious, of course, is Zovatto as Alcala. He’s got the intensity of a young Vincent D’Onofrio, but he’s charming as all get-out when he wants to be. In fact, the thing separating him from the other largely benign creeps we meet in this movie is that he seems to wilfully sacrifice his advantage with potential victims. There’s one woman here that he seems destined to win over, and then he just decides to go vacant eyed and psychotic, without any real trigger from her. Crazy is even crazier when it is applied haphazardly. With him, the madness is the strategy.

You get the sense of Kendrick’s personal investment in this material. That’s not to suggest she has been the victim of malevolent men herself, though it might put her in the statistical minority if she hadn’t been. Rather, she has always had a delicate, bird-like quality to her frame, seeming all the more vulnerable to having her bones crushed by a person who wanted to do that. In her performance she embodies both a modern-day bullshit detector and a person with enough self-esteem issues to place herself in harm’s way. Without creating a narrative contradiction, she’s speaking to us from 2024 while existing believably in 1978.

Woman of the Hour, mostly unconventional throughout, succumbs to a small bit of tired thinking by abruptly finishing with text about what happened to whom, for those whose fates are not decided on screen. This breaks the spell of Kendrick’s good filmmaking, reminding us that this a true crime story at its core. Then again, it’s a true crime story that sheds light on a monstrous figure who isn’t as known as he might be, and it’s a true crime story that puts us in the shoes of its disempowered victims, reminding us how uncomfortable those shoes were.

 

Woman of the Hour is currently streaming on Netflix.