Woman of the Hour

Woman of the Hour is a crime thriller genre movie released in 2023, which meteoric rising American actress Anna Kendrick as a film director. True to the fiction of the movie, it was based on the horrifying story of Rodney Alcala, a serial killer to boot who guested in a 1970s show called The Dating Game. The story revolves around Sheryl Bradshaw in her dream to be an actress portrayed by Kendrick just to take Alcala out and eventually be killed by him.

The aspects of the film are related to the themes of misogyny and violence and how women deal with strange men. It captures a form of Alcala’s persona and dolled-out charm graphically presents the interactions he has with his victims, and highlights the various institutional deficiencies that enabled him to continue perpetrating his heinous acts despite complaints lodged against him.

When I looked back at my own life, I could connect to the vulnerability, but also the suspense in some scenes in the movie that might appear completely ordinary from the outside. It is most useful as a caution against the evils of talking to strangers since such incidents are still possible in today’s society. It is for these reasons and supported by a good plot and good acting, the film is not only entertaining but is a social relevance message too.

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Tough but commendable choice for a directorial debut, to make a story out of something as complex, layered and non linear as true crime and gendered violence. And to do it so demurely—goes to show that a good film doesn't need to explicitly perpetuate exploitation in order for it to be present and sensed.

What else to say but that I liked it... Woman of the Hour didn't strike me as yet another true crime adaptation seeking to conflate performative justice and mass entertainment, to me, this couldn't more clearly –neither on the nose, nor subtle enough to miss– be a critique of what continues to happen, of how class and gendered culture systemically uphold, enable and embed men in the social, figurative and literal deathly supression of women and children. An estimate as high as 130 isn't an extraordinary number, just a murder record, an statistic, it's weaponized, judicial negligence that to this day haunts us, because simply put: those whose jobs is to count our bodies, are the ones leaving us for dead.

Not much has changed, that much is a universal truth; I guess, now, we just get people like Anna Kendrick and Ian McDonald to critique all of this in cleverly put stories shot in cool and warm dual tones.