Anna Kendrick is on a mission. Other than a troll film here and there, post pandemic she’s really been digging into heavy dramas and thrillers, emotionally putting us through the ringer so she can explain some of the tough stuff she’s been through herself. To make sure we’re all getting the message, Kendrick takes the leap to the director’s chair as well as lead actress in Woman of the Hour. Ladies, take heed, and watch yourself, even if you get lucky enough to be on The Dating Game.
That lucky lady is Cheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick). Well actually not; her LA Actress Dream is mired in distracted casting agents and “nice” guys offering to help her with her acting. Desperate, she takes a gig on The Dating Game hosted by Ed Burke (Tony Hale), getting to choose between 3 bachelors and maybe getting a nice date with good guy. One of those “good” guys though is Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), a legendary serial killer who traversed the United States, manipulating, sexually abusing, and murdering several women, on the hunt for his latest victim.
For a first timer, Anna Kendrick shows pretty solid directorial skills that hide her rookie status. Instead of turning the movie into a Kendrick vanity project about Cheryl, e.g. her, and her crusade against horrible men, she taps into people’s true crime fascination by interspersing her character’s narrative with Rodney’s. So instead of introducing him as “another” bad guy when she gets to the dating show and pulling the rug from under us, she shows the streaming audience enough of his horrible acts, and how the system always allows him to get away with it. Plus, she takes the “evil” murderer and makes him a person, charming and smart enough to desperate women to let him into their lives before realizing it’s too late. This murderer “distraction” allows Kendrick to pull the audience in and drive home her big idea: women should always choose the bear. Juxtaposed to Rodney, people like host Ed Burke, or acting coach Terry (Pete Holmes) seems like saints. But because you’re locked into the serial killer plot, Woman of the Hour also locks you into seeing the quotations around the “nice” guys that Cheryl, and EVERY woman, has to deal with on a day to day basis. So even if our heroine is lucky enough to dodge Rodney’s cruelty, there’s always another man around the corner, ready to take his place.
Director Anna will look back at Woman of the Hour as probably a missed opportunity for more thrills. I wish Rodney’s mini stories were a bit more varied, with him using even fewer words to really paint how calculated and fearsome he was going to be as soon as he hits The Dating Game. There’s a subplot with a woman named Laura (Nicolette Robinson) that thematically serves the movie but basically doesn’t raise the stakes as the show goes on. At least Kendrick nails the big sequence, in the parking lot of the TV studio. That sequence, to any woman (or jumpy human, like me) walking alone at night, will trigger all sorts of primal fears and have you on the edge of your seat, afraid for the worst. Just a little creative license earlier could have really made that big capper number feel like the culmination of a building tension in Woman of the Hour, but because of the choppy tone, the film never congeals soon enough for that type of payoff.
But still, a win is a win. And Woman of the Hour shows us a new side of Anna Kendrick we might be getting for the next few decades. Are we going to get a Greta Gerwig type rise to Hollywood Power? Even if this is a one and donner, Kendrick can be proud of what she’s made, giving a voice to all those voiceless women suffocated the patriarchal systems, struggling to breathe.