Anna Kendrick's unflinching directorial debut reimagines true crime for a post-#MeToo era

At first glance, Netflix's Woman of the Hour is another true crime fictionalization that plays into our preoccupation with American serial killers of decades past.

Directed by Anna Kendrick, who also plays female protagonist Sheryl Bradshaw, the film reconstructs the crimes of serial rapist and murderer Rodney Alcala, also known as the “Dating Game Killer.” Alcala appeared on (and won) a TV matchmaking show in 1978, in the midst of a year-long killing spree.

The film examines historical sexual violence on both an individual and institutional level. It reveals the intense physical and psychological cruelty that Alcala inflicted on his victims, as well as the cruelty and misogyny of the patriarchal culture that enabled such behavior.

“Woman of the Hour” is a groundbreaking text: it is the first feminist true-crime film to achieve commercial success since the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017.

See and be seen

“Woman of the Hour” inverts the sadistic and voyeuristic “male gaze” of traditional true crime by forcing the viewer to identify with the female victim rather than the male perpetrator.

As film theorist and gender studies expert Sarah Projanksy noted in her influential book Watching Rape:

Depictions of sexual violence in most horror and crime novels run the risk of expanding and reproducing eroticized violence against women, even if the victims defend themselves.

But Kendrick's directorial debut doesn't romanticize Alcala or glorify its crimes. There are no cowering or moaning victims in various stages of undress.

Instead, through careful cropping and close-ups, we see the panicked discomfort of Alcala's victims as they navigate the dangers of dating, the damaging effects of casual misogyny, and the ever-present threat of male fragility.

As Margaret Atwood once said, men are afraid that women will laugh at them, while women are afraid that men will kill them.

“Did you feel seen?” Alcala asks Sheryl after the aspiring actress appeared on The Dating Game with Alcala to be “seen.”

“I felt looked at,” Sheryl replies.

The tense interactions between predator and prey create an almost unbearable tension for the viewer, who has already seen through Alcala's superficial charisma and charm.

Alcala was an amateur photographer who often exploited his victims' desire to be understood and “seen,” luring them under the pretense of photographing them.

The film's unsettling dialogue and intelligent use of visual metaphors portray women as objects to be looked at, but with a twist: the female characters are aware that they are being stalked and trapped (even if the realization comes too late).

In a subtle but devastating way, Kendrick presents the horrific rape and torture committed by Alcala from the victim's perspective. The camerawork highlights the victims' feelings of shock and disorientation, but never in a voyeuristic or gratuitous way.

A game full of murder and romance

“Woman of the Hour” implicitly suggests that part of Alcala's perverse pleasure in killing came from his playful implementation of the process.

In the film, Alcala strangles his victims and then revives them, sometimes multiple times, before subjecting them once again to the horror of his violence and the knowledge of their own death. His appearance on The Dating Game is the ultimate power move in his game of murder and romance.

“I always get the girl,” Alcala grins at a competitor.

His challenge extends not just to Sheryl, the blind date on the other side of the screen, but to the entire studio audience and viewers at home.

However, the film makes it clear that romance was never Alcala's goal. Instead, he uses lovemaking to exploit his victims' vulnerability and trust. In this regard, the game is rigged in his favor.

When a woman in the audience realizes that Alcala is the man who raped and killed her friend years earlier, she tries to bring her concerns to the show's producers, but is fobbed off by a security guard. In another act of cruel male deception, the security guard tells them to wait for a “senior executive” who he knows is actually the janitor.

It seems that women are merely pawns in the patriarchal game of 1970s America – a time when women's testimonies of sexual abuse and harassment were viewed with suspicion and their safety was routinely disregarded.

Alcala after #MeToo

The women who survive Alcala's violence in “Woman of the Hour” are the ones who recognize the artificiality of his love script before reversing that script and presenting it to him just as convincingly.

When teenage runaway Amy wakes up in the remote desert after Alcala brutally raped and assaulted her, she outsmarts him by timidly asking him to keep what happened a secret.

By luring Alcala into a false sense of security, Amy convinces him to spare her. When Alcala arrives at a gas station, she flees to a nearby restaurant and alerts the police, who arrive and arrest him.

In the end, Kendrick's message is clear: “There is no happy ending with a story like this.”

This post-#MeToo version of Alcala's violent crimes is a commentary on the systemic misogyny — including police and judicial failures — that allowed a serial killer who appeared on national television to evade detection.

Kendrick, the woman of the moment, refuses to look away.