Amid the deluge of true crime content in recent years is the occasional story about the one who escaped. The one who found themselves in the killer’s crosshairs and escaped. The ones who jumped out of the van, or ran away, or got lucky. These stories offer jolts of sympathy and terror, but little edification. How can they? To be caught up in a situation like that is to be beyond the realm of ordinary comprehension.
The actor Anna Kendrick (known for her Oscar-nominated turn in Up in the Air, as well roles in the Pitch Perfect and Twilight franchises) tells the story of one such escapee in her directorial debut, Woman of the Hour. Kendrick plays Sheryl, a struggling actor living in 1970s Los Angeles, all psychedelic prints, flared jeans, funk on the airwaves. Sheryl is intelligent and ambitious, but is stuck going to auditions where her appearance is blithely evaluated and she’s asked to do nudity – Kendrick delivers an engaging and believable performance of a bright woman constrained by circumstance. Sheryl wants to give up, but her agent calls with good news: a TV show wants to cast her. It is a dating show, and a corny one at that. But it’s a start.
The film is a lightly fictionalised take on the historic case of Rodney Alcala, who in 1978 appeared on the popular show The Dating Game. By the time Alcala was on the show – and “won” a date with Kendrick’s real-life counterpart, Cheryl Bradshaw – he had murdered five women, and would go on to kill at least three more. Little is known of the real-life Bradshaw. She reportedly found Alcala “creepy” after the show, and asked the producers if she could get out of dating him (they agreed). Kendrick’s portrayal of Sheryl shows a woman who is playful and quick-witted, at one point going off-script on the show – where she has been instructed to play dumb – to tease the bachelors with difficult questions about Einstein’s theory of relativity and “the difference between a boy and a man”.
Scenes of other women meeting Rodney across America are interwoven throughout. A flight attendant who needs help bringing furniture into her apartment. A woman reeling from a break-up. A teenage runaway. Kendrick’s film grants them their individuality and humanity by emphasising their independence, their hunger for adventure. Meanwhile Rodney, played with sinister charm by Daniel Zovatto, lures them in through his identity as a photographer after a muse. The camera, it is suggested, can expose difficult truths; it can also be used to claim ownership, and to indulge. “Did you feel seen?” Sheryl is asked after the show. “I felt looked at,” she replies. It could be a comment on true crime, a genre that trades in looking at what should not be looked at: the gory details of the very real violence inflicted on very real people. With cinematography by Zach Kuperstein, the camerawork in Woman of the Hour attempts to avoid leering at its subjects, zooming out during moments of extreme violence while relying on the use of sound – screams, heavy breathing – to convey terror, but cannot negate the story’s inherent voyeurism.
Scene after scene affirms the inevitable pattern: the meet-cute with the killer, the sinister turn (too often signalled by obviously creepy music), the conflagration of violence. It is an unlikely, and not always successful, pairing: using Hollywood dramatic techniques of exploiting shock and suspense to sombre and depressing ends. Woman of the Hour makes a point of such repetition, to emphasise the many futures that were stolen, how girl after girl after girl was let down. “What are girls for?” Sheryl asks the bachelors in a memorable moment in The Dating Game. By weaving together experiences from different women, Kendrick’s film strives to build lines of solidarity between them: the waitress who helps Sheryl while she is on her terrible date; the woman in the audience of The Dating Game who recognises Rodney and goes backstage to report him. Their efforts appear both valiant and hopeless against the backdrop of police apathy and widespread sexism that surround them.
However generous its intentions, as it veers from one woman’s story to another, Woman of the Hour struggles to cohere. The vignettes are too brief, an uneven series of portraits of women caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The strongest ones subtly show the gender dynamics at play, as Alcala’s desire to dominate slowly reveals itself, while his victims try to be as gentle, as obedient, as charming as possible to avoid danger. But put together, do they have anything to say? It’s unclear what this parade of tragedy can tell us. Here, the film becomes tangled in the incoherence that marks much of true crime, a genre that grasps towards meaning, asking: how can this happen? What makes someone capable of such acts? But we may never know. In the absence of any possibility of understanding, what is on offer instead is repetition, where well-worn ideas are retread – that horrors can be found lurking everywhere; that safety is never guaranteed, particularly for girls. After the film’s suspiciously neat ending, a sombre epilogue totals the atrocity of Alcala’s crimes. He is suspected of killing up to 130 women. What are girls for? On the game show, Rodney, playing the gentlemen, replies winningly “that’s up to the girl”. The audience claps. Sheryl is charmed. The trap lies in wait.
“Woman of the Hour” is in cinemas now
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