Written by: Ian McDonald
Starring: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Zovatto, Nicolette Robinson, Tony Hale
Rating: [2.5/5]
Violence perpetrated on women has remained the modus operandi for famous serial killers, who found enjoyment or satisfaction in a particular type of victim. Patterns emerge and unfortunately it takes too long to pick up on them before stopping the carnage already done. Through her directorial debut, Anna Kendrick seeks to highlight how this continually transpires with one particular man, but through her unfocused lens, she loses the plot in driving the point home.
Struggling actor, Sheryl Bradshaw (Anna Kendrick) gets an opportunity for a paying gig by participating in the dating game show called “The Dating Game.” While participating in the game where she must ask questions of three bachelors without seeing their faces, she does not realize that one of them happens to be a serial killer.
Split amongst two narratives, eventually coming together, Woman of the Hour presents a well-intentioned but muddled story seeking to highlight the perpetual violence women face at the hands of men. The violence in this instance gets its inspiration from Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) who murdered at least seven women and girls before getting locked up. The film displays some of the instances where he killed these women and then we cut to Sheryl, who will eventually come face-to-face with him when they meet on the game show. Certainly a choice made there by Kendrick and screenwriter, Ian McDonald, but unfortunately not one that necessarily works as intended.
It mostly feels like two films operating in completely different tones then coming together where the finale delivers something fantastic but the journey there felt mostly confusing in its composition. There’s this unrelenting dread felt every time we cut to Rodney and another one of his murders but then it pans over to Sheryl, who’s this quirky girl, just trying to make it as an actor. Sheryl, as a character, mostly feels shoehorned into this story and takes away from these victims, and especially one, in particular, who has a pivotal moment in the narrative. These other women could have been spared more screen time but we have to get back to Sheryl and her worries about her acting career and how she annoys the host of the dating show cutting her a check. It also certainly does not help that Kendrick casts herself in the leading role, making this feeling of this character being surplus to requirements for the majority of this feature all the more noticeable.
This tonal imbalance ultimately becomes the undoing of a promising story but also quite the fine directorial debut by Anna Kendrick. The very best the film has to offer mostly appears when the film locks in and focuses on the interactions between Sheryl and Rodney. Kendrick in these final scenes builds this level of tension, aided by what we know about Rodney and what Sheryl then begins to pick up from the feeling he evokes. It builds this unrelenting dread of whether the girl we have been following all of this time will be one of his many victims. Kendrick presents a circumstance many women have encountered that must hit home quite hard. If anything, this does get me excited for what she will direct in the future, because she definitely has a good eye for how she presents specific scenes. She just needs a sharper story to take on, which she did not receive here.
Even with it having a decent ending to it, Woman of the Hour remains a deeply flawed film failed by its entire structure. While certainly an idea aiming to achieve something, the attempt at bringing together two threads eventually got us to an end that certainly did not justify the means. Everyone other than Sheryl felt shortchanged in this story, even Rodney to a strange degree as well, which one does not typically say about serial killers. Instead, the first two acts of this film serve as a bunch of shorts along with Sheryl’s journey to get to the show where she will eventually cross paths with Rodney. An interesting story definitely exists here, but the structure of it just did not land with the intended impact. But even then, Anna Kendrick displays that she just may have the goods behind the camera, which will remain the main takeaway of this film.
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