Ever hear about the serial killer who became a contestant on The Dating Game? Rodney Alcala, often compared with Ted Bundy, is known to have murdered at least 8 women in the 1970s, and possibly as many as 130. His horribly specific M.O. was to lure his victims out into the desert for purported photo shoots, strangle them during sexual assault, then resuscitate them to carry on.
Woman of the Hour is not a straight biopic of Alcala in that Netflix true-crime-exploitation mould. It centres on his eerie, Blind-Date-style TV appearance in 1978, when he was eventually chosen by Cheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actress from Phoenix. She managed to cancel their date afterwards, very possibly saving her life, and Alcala was caught the next year.
Anna Kendrick looks nothing like the real Cheryl Bradshaw, but no matter: she was taken enough with this script to seize both the role and the directing reins. Strangely, the weakest scenes in her film are the ones on The Dating Game itself, which aren’t sordid enough to be convincing: they play like an overbright, very Netflix-y pastiche of 1970s TV chauvinism. Of course, we have a host (Tony Hale) begging Cheryl to play dumb rather than smart, and to go easy on the clueless men she’s quizzing.
The answers from Rodney (Daniel Zovatto) as Contestant Number Three play as inevitably creepy to the viewer in the know – “We’ll have a great time together, Cheryl!” – while, on the other side of the partition, she’s wrapped up in getting through it all with some dignity intact.
Zovatto (It Follows), who does terrifically insinuating work here, gets at least as much screen time as Kendrick. Unlike Cheryl, we’re privy to Rodney’s crimes.