Woman of the Hour
Woman of the Hour
Woman of the Hour is based on the stranger-than-fiction true story of Cheryl Bradshaw and Rodney Alcala. Bradshaw was a bachelorette on the hit '70s TV matchmaking show The Dating Game and chose handsome and funny bachelor No. 3, Rodney Alcala. But behind Alcala's charming facade was a deadly secret: He was a psychopathic serial killer.
vangh1 reviewedOctober 29, 2024
I thought the concept of this movie was a little bit quirky and fun despite the plot revolving around a serial killer, and wow did this thing prove me wrong inside of the first scene.
Incredibly hard to watch, incredibly sombre, incredibly harrowing despite Anna Kendrick bringing her trademark charisma in front of the camera, and a surprisingly adept touch from behind it. She takes a sort of empathetic path to the tone, with a number of scenes wrapping the lighting and score around the subject of the scene's mental state, pulling us as the viewer into the same state. It works far more often than it doesn't (The Great: Sheryl and Rod in the restaurant and the subsequent parking lot scene / The Less than Great: Laura waiting in a studio lobby and it's shot like the scariest horror movie you've ever seen)
I've seen a lot of complaints about the structure and lack of chronological consistency as the story progresses, but I thought they doled information out at the right pace, in the right order. We open the movie in 1977 learning he is a killer before he's on the show. Then we jump to '78 where we learn he's on the show. Then we're in '79 and we learn he's still free and hunting young women, but we don't know about Sheryl's fate. The jump back to '71 indicates he's been doing what he's doing and getting away with it for a long time. And the movie labels each time line clearly so I thought it worked at providing new information in a non-confusing way. I was surprised to see so many people have issue with it.
I'm generally not a fan of serial killer movies (and I'm sure I've said this in past reviews) because I've heard about war movies "It's impossible to depict them without glorifying them" and I definitely think that's the case with serial killers to some degree. There's no doubt this is a very empathetic take from the victim's perspectives, there's no doubt they show far more of Rod's horrors than humanizing moments or excuses for his violence but there's a marked difference between reading about his charm in a journalistic article and seeing it performed and feeling its effects.
I think almost every male character is either actively a horrible person or stands idly by while it's clear some other man is being a horrible person and so the women are left to fend for themselves (or at best settle for an encouraging word from another female) which as I see it speaks to the failings of the systems and society at large that allowed Rodney to do what he did for so long without consequence.
The climactic sequence with Autumn Best is equal parts bone chilling and awe-inspiring. Her performance throughout is phenomenal, but especially leading into the final sequence.
I hate having to assign star ratings to movies after experiences like this. It's undeniably better than a 3.5 star movie, but I just struggle so much with true crime and serial killers stories on such a fundamental level that I can't give it any higher a score.