Anna Kendrick, the cheery Pitch Perfect star and all-singing powerhouse behind the successful family-friendly Trolls franchise, makes her directorial debut with a fiercely committed depiction of murder and misogyny in 1970s America.
Here the subject is a bizarre real-life incident from 1978, when the serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) appeared on The Dating Game (the American Blind Date) and subsequently won a weekend away with the “bachelorette” and aspiring actress Cheryl Bradshaw (also Kendrick).
Around this episode Kendrick slowly assembles, through alternating flashbacks and flash-forwards, a portrait of Alcala’s homicidal obsessions, his brittle narcissism, and his belief that he could murder with impunity (the end credits suggest that he may have killed as many as 130 women and girls). The most unsettling line