‘Woman of the Hour’ is the Best True Crime Movie of the Year
Netflix releases a lot of slop. I don’t strictly mean that as an indictment of the streaming service, largely because the slop is mostly a byproduct of quantity. In order to compete in an ever-expanding streaming ecosystem, Netflix, like its digital peers, often inundates viewers with new titles (or *shudder* content), every week. Most of those movies are forgettable, an ephemeral water cooler topic until the Next New Thing arrives on Friday evening. There are some gems among the rubble—His House, Incantation, and Apostle are all-timers—and this past weekend, a new certified hit joined their ranks. Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman of the Hour isn’t just one of the fiercest true crime adaptations of the year. It’s one of Netflix’s best acquisitions in years.
The key reason is that director Anna Kendrick and writer Ian McDonald have a clear, compelling point of view. Ostensibly, Woman of the Hour is just another Netflix true-crime pump and dump—a movie that is simultaneously attractive to shareholders and audiences interested in disposable, exploitative, sensational stranger-than-fiction crimes. Think the streamer’s docuseries Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer or one of Netflix’s most-watched series ever, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
Those titles, and others like them in an era where murder and mutilation are the zeitgeist, draw viewers in with the promise of some profound insight into the workings of a killer (or monster). What motivates them? Could they have been stopped? Is there something about them we’ll never, really truly understand? Human beings are innately fascinated by the abstractions of a killer’s mind, the simultaneous pull and push of true savagery that attracts and repels. The subgenre isn’t going anywhere, even if there’s little compelling evidence it should have existed in the first place.
Remarkably, Woman of the Hour has a pretty clear thesis: Rodney Alcala was not a fascinating man. The American serial killer and sex offender has been conclusively linked to eight murders between 1977 and 1979, with some estimates as high as 130 (though from what I can gather, those are pretty baseless claims). That’s it. Woman of the Hour, unlike its contemporary, true crime peers, has no interest in understanding him. In fact, the movie isn’t really all that interested in him at all. Daniel Zovatto, fantastic in the role, consciously spotlights Alcala’s shallowness. He has nothing of note to really say. Sure, it sounds nice at first, but he’s no different than any other misogynist, any other cad who knows what to say and when to say it, but not why it needs to be said.
Take one of Woman of the Hour’s most chilling moments. The title and narrative embellish Alcala’s appearance on a 1978 episode of the syndicated game show The Dating Game. Anna Kendrick’s composite Cheryl is the (un)lucky woman forced to wade through a sea of misogyny and terrible, horrible potential bachelors for a grand prize date. Kendrick and McDonald have fun scripting and filming these moments. Spatially, Kendrick is isolated, and she often prefers wide, agoraphobic shots to highlight how in a studio so big, danger remains frighteningly close. McDonald, for his part, writes Cheryl with a bit more spunk than the real-life iteration likely had. After the game’s first round, Cheryl discards the script, opting instead to have a little fun with the dolts she’s supposed to be fawning over.
She asks one bachelor about Immanuel Kant, and another about relativity, though her standout moment is when she asks the trio, “What are girls for?” The use of “girls,” of course, is telling. Linguistically, “girls” instead of “women” is infantilizing, and several recent studies highlight how gendered language not only reinforces antiquated gender roles but also singularly impacts women who endure it, reducing both confidence and key leadership qualities over time. None of the men opt to use “women”, instead floundering to figure out what, exactly, they think “girls” are for. Anyone can easily see which part of their body is doing the thinking during the inquiry.
Alcala chills when he answers, “That’s up to the girl.” Reasonably, a safe answer, one that respects Cheryl’s agency. Knowing what the audience knows about Alcala, of course, the answer is considerably more loaded than the other two bachelors’. Structurally, Kendrick cuts back and forth between the rapid-fire round and another young woman’s frustrating quest to connect with a show’s producer about recognizing Alcala as the man who likely murdered her friend.
In both The Dating Game and the broader world of 1978 (and today, really), it wasn’t up to the “girls.” Sure, not every man was quite as monstrous as Alcala, but Kendrick and McDonald revel in the grounded verisimilitude of everyday misogyny, whether from security guards or game show hosts (Tony Hale, delightfully scuzzy in the role). And what are “girls” really for? Ask Alcala again as he stalks Kendrick’s Cheryl across a continental parking lot during the film’s breathless, armrest-clenching climax.
There was a meme a while back whose core argument has stuck with me. Watch enough true crime and the mystery will evaporate. There are no fascinating killers or inexplicable crimes. Often, it’s just the failures of both law enforcement and a larger patriarchal society that irregularly takes these things seriously. At Woman of the Hour’s end, the on-screen text nicely synopsizes how Alcala managed to kill for so long—lots of women reported him, but no one ever listened.
That point-of-view, that strident, chilling undercurrent that still plays out today, is why Woman of the Hour is more than just another Netflix serial killer movie. The technical aspects are more assured than most debuts, and while Kendrick is pulling from Hitchcock and Fincher (with a little dash of her mumblecore origins for good measure), her use of space and landscapes compels, imbuing Woman of the Hour with a cinematic gravitas and sense of interiority seen too little these days. And, yeah, that’s all good (really, I like when movies look like movies), but it’s what Woman of the Hour says that renders it so successful.
The message might not be all that new, though it is more accessible, more pronounced, more stirring here than it is elsewhere. Under the hot studio lights, Kendrick interrogates not just the culture of true crime, but the culture of violence against women. For her and the other women, it’s life or death. For the men, it’s nothing more than a game— it’s all just entertainment.
Woman of the Hour is now streaming free on Netflix.
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