A couple of years ago, I left my parents’ place late at night to walk to my own rental a short distance away. I had walked that route hundreds of times before with no sense of fear or trepidation, until I was confronted by this drunk man in the vicinity of my parents’ home. After that encounter, I would never feel safe again, and the world seemed to be filled with more shadows than light.
That encounter was on my mind as I watched Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour, a film that highlights how truly dangerous men can be, and how we never see their predatory natures until they choose to show it to us.
It is the 1970s in Los Angeles, and Sheryl (Anna Kendrick) is an aspiring actress trying to get her big break in Hollywood. She’s going on casting calls but she’s not booking anything, so out of desperation, she says yes to being a participant on The Dating Game. The reality dating show involves a bachelorette picking between three bachelors, sight unseen on both sides. Sheryl has to ask them a series of questions and choose the lucky man she would want to date by the end of the show. Unknown to her, one of the contestants, Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), is a serial killer. Our awareness of Rodney as a killer actually creates quite a fair bit of tension; even as he gives Sheryl picture-perfect answers, we know that beneath that genial mask is a misogynist who violent rapes and murders women.
Zovatto is frightening as Alcala. He listens intently to the women he preys on, and pretends like he cares about their struggles and emotional burdens. He listens until it no longer benefits him; then he lets the mask slip. Zovatto is able to go so quickly from friendly and easy-going to simply unnerving. We can see the switch happening right before our eyes, where Mr. Nice Guy drops all forms of pretense and shows us the rot beneath. Kendrick’s scenes with Zovatto are the most nerve-racking parts of the film, especially since we’re gotten to know Sheryl and don’t want anything bad to happen to her.
The dating show is the centre of the film, and Kendrick uses match-cuts to break away to other narratives that involve Alcala’s other victims. The film has quite number of static shots, which emphasize the images of Alcala’s kinetic brutality as he wrestles and violently subdues his victims, and all we can do is watch passively on. These narratives always unfold the same way, with Alcala setting his trap and pouncing on his victim the moment they see him for the monster that he is. A woman’s intuition is a potent thing, but we often ignore what our gut is telling us because we don’t want to offend the seemingly nice man. We seek to please and play nice because that’s what society has trained us to do, in part driven by a survival instinct perhaps. After all, if I’m nice to this man, maybe he won’t hurt me or do me harm.
Woman of the Hour is blatant in its message: it is the system that has failed these women, that allowed them to become a mere statistic rather than properly investigate the man who has all this smoke on him. They allowed the fire to build into a frenzy, with Alcala destroying so many lives before he had to answer for his crimes. This shouldn’t be the way, we need to do better.
REVIEW SCORE: 3.5/5