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The last place a serial killer wants to be seen is on national TV – or so you’d think. But on 13 September 1978, that’s exactly where Rodney Alcala chose to be. His shag haircut and wide grin were broadcast to the tens of thousands of households tuning into The Dating Game, in which single women quizzed saucy suitors from behind a screen. By the time of his appearance, Alcala – a photographer – had murdered and raped several women and girls, but that night he was one of three bachelors wooing aspiring actor Cheryl Bradshaw.
This bizarre moment in American history is the crux around which Woman of the Hour revolves. A (mostly fictionalised) thriller flecked with violence, Netflix’s quasi-biopic narrates Alcala’s horrific killing spree, and the sexist society that failed his victims.
In an impressive directorial debut, Anna Kendrick tells Alcala’s story through the eyes of women who crossed his path – including Cheryl, whom Kendrick also portrays. Through Cheryl, she paints a bleak picture of casual misogyny. Sexism leaps out from behind every corner, as subtle as a mallet to the skull: at an audition, she is spoken about like a piece of meat; at home, an overfamiliar neighbour guilts her into sex with him; backstage, a TV host tells her to smile and dumb it down for the men. Woman of the Hour would be guilty of overegging were it not true.
We are similarly never put in the position of having to judge the women who choose to trust Alcala (played here by an excellent Daniel Zovatto), or marvel at their supposed gullibility. Instead, Kendrick aptly conjures the mood of the Seventies – a shimmering haze through which things like hitchhiking and inviting a stranger into your home are completely plausible.
As a director, she also treads carefully so as to never romanticise Alcala or fetishise the gore of his crimes – the storytelling here is sensitive, and the killer’s most heinous acts take place off screen. Elsewhere, though, that sense of white-knuckle control can exude extreme self-consciousness – we receive little insight into Alcala’s motivations and mental state, no doubt an ethical choice on behalf of Kendrick and screenwriter Ian McDonald, but their film would’ve benefited from further fleshing him out. Alcala’s victims are rendered similarly compressed; their flashbacks are both too fleeting and too frequent. The film seems to walk on eggshells. Aesthetically, too, it’s polished to an extent that feels inauthentic. Like last year’s Prime Video series Daisy Jones & the Six, there are far too many straight teeth and well-pressed bell-bottom suits here.
Overall, though, the takeaway from Woman of the Hour is that this is not the story of an individual evil, but mass complicity from a society that allowed Alcala to continue his reign of terror far longer than it should’ve. It reaches an apotheosis with The Dating Game, by which time (in real life) Alcala was already a convicted sex offender. “If this guy did what you’re implying, wouldn’t he be in jail and not on a TV show?” one man in the crowd asks his girlfriend when she recognises Alcala on the show. You’d think, wouldn’t you?
Dir: Anna Kendrick. Starring: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Zovatto, Tony Hale, Nicolette Robinson, Kathryn Gallagher, Autumn Best. 15, 95 mins.
‘Woman of the Hour’ is streaming on Netflix from 18 October
