#TIFF23 Review: Woman of the Hour (Special Presentations)

By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

Anna Kendrick makes her directorial debut with Woman of the Hour (which just sold to Netflix for a cool $11 million), a based-on-a-true-story serial killer thriller inspired by the time when the real life murderer Rodney Alcala appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game in the 1970s.

Kendrick casts herself in the role of Sheryl, a struggling actress who is booked by her agent to appear as a contestant on The Dating Game, a reality show forcing female players to blindly interview and choose between three bachelors in front of a live audience. Among the men is Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), who was in the midst of a murder spree preying on young woman by posing as a photographer when he appeared on the show.

The screenplay by Ian MacAllister McDonald employs a fractured narrative to tell this story, jumping back and forth between several points in time to shed light on Alcala’s crimes and show a few of his other victims. The violence itself mostly happens off-screen, but there is no less a chilling quality to it from our awareness of what is happening. In this regard, Kendrick does a good job of handling the film’s tone, drawing tension that ratchets up in key sequences but also keeping her film entertaining.

The film introduces a lot of ideas about gender dynamics, media manipulation, and how women are forced to perform for toxic men. But, at barely ninety minutes long, the script isn’t quite able to grapple with everything that it wants to. The pieces do connect, but it can feel slightly disjointed, with the main storyline involving The Dating Game ending up being somewhat secondary. But the performances keep the film engaging.

Zovatto is unsettling as Alcala; the actor captures the way he turns his charm on and off depending who he is with or if the cameras are on, showing how easy it was for people to be duped by his false charm. Kendrick’s Sheryl also displays an innate ability to play to the cameras and audience, with some of the film’s best scenes being the back and forth’s between her and Alcala during the taping of the show. A few narrative shortcomings aside, Woman of the Hour is a pretty good directorial debut from Kendrick, that shows promise for her as a filmmaker.