Woman of the Hour opens on a quintessential, stereotyped woman of the 1970s. She’s in bell bottoms and a flowy top, free-spirited enough to head into the middle of nowhere with a charming-ish photographer. As the man (soon to be revealed to be serial killer Rodney Alcala, played by Daniel Zovatto) takes her photos against the backdrop of the barren desert, the woman explains that her mother deemed her most recent ex-boyfriend “risky.” “Everyone’s risky,” the girl shrugs in response to her mother’s concern. It’s almost prophetic, as she is tackled to the ground and strangled just moments later.
In 1978, serial killer Alcala appeared on the TV show “The Dating Game” in the midst of his multi-year killing spree. Woman of the Hour is divided between recountings of his killings and the life of struggling actress Cheryl (director Anna Kendrick), a bright woman desperate enough for work that she’s willing to play dumb and giggly for an hour on a falsified dating show.
Woman of the Hour admirably doesn’t get lost in the weeds of attempting to directly retell the story of Alcala and his disturbingly-timed game show appearance. Instead, it chooses to use the bare bones of this true crime anecdote to explore the impossible nature of constantly performing womanhood “correctly” under the inherent and constant threat of male violence, with parallels drawn between Alcala’s victims and Cheryl’s attempts at performing friendly, flirty, approachable womanhood on-camera as “herself.”
There are some striking comedic cameos, particularly Pete Holmes as Cheryl’s neighbor and Tony Hale as the cheesy, not-quite-sleazy host of “The Dating Game.” But “The Dating Game” comedic players are not all that funny. Instead, these cameos are used to highlight an off-putting “nice guy”-ness that hides misogynistic expectations of well-behaved women on their TV screens and friendly neighbors who will eventually put out.
When the make-up woman comes to touch up Cheryl’s make-up after Cheryl has turned “The Dating Game” on its head by throwing away the dumb questions handed to her and making up her own witty, prodding ones, Cheryl tells her she’s worried she’s upset the showrunners. The make-up woman shrugs off her concerns with a disturbing and frank thought about the flirty interrogation of the three unseen men Cheryl flirts with: “The question beneath the question stays the same: are you gonna hurt me?”
Women are not built to be violence detectors. Everyone is risky. The question isn’t just, “Are you gonna hurt me?” but, “How bad? Will I live? Will I be able to smile and flirt my way out of the worst of it, maybe?” Woman of the Hour isn’t necessarily bringing anything new to the handful of genres it picks from, but the film holds these occasional tight, well-put truths about performing womanhood in a relatively skillful and palatable container.
