I.

Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman of the Hour premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2023 and was released by Netflix in October 2024. It ought to have been a compelling story—a fictionalised account of a real-life vetting snafu that allowed a serial killer named Rodney Alcala to be booked as a bachelor contestant on The Dating Game television show in 1978. But Kendrick has given the narrative some 21st-century feminist topspin, evidently intended to capitalise on the extremely recent #MeToo and #BelieveWomen zeitgeist. Six months after it appeared, her film already looks like an ideological relic.

Kendrick plays Sheryl Bradshaw, a version of real-life Dating Game participant Cheryl Bradshaw, who picked Alcala as her date but found something off-putting about his vibes and never went out with him. Kendrick and screenwriter Ian McDonald present their fleshed-out version of this episode as a study in pervasive misogyny that extends far beyond Alcala’s lethal obsessions and into the realm of the “societal” and the “systemic.” It is the only movie I have ever seen in which every male character we meet or even hear about turns out to be a dangerous creep or a predatory sleaze or an insensitive sexist jerk of some kind. In Kendrick’s universe, the psychopath is not a categorically different kind of man but just a more extreme instance of omnipresent sexually aggressive and threatening male behaviour.

The real-life Rodney Alcala died of a heart attack in a Californian prison in 2021 aged 77, having dodged a death sentence imposed for seven murders he committed in the state between 1977 and 1979. (He was also convicted of two murders in the state of New York, and has been linked via DNA testing and recently discovered evidence to more than a hundred other homicides.) One of the California murders was committed less than three months before his Dating Game appearance on 13 September 1978.