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Watching Woman of the Hour, it does seem to make odd decisions concerning what the whole thing should be centred on. The narrative is built around Cheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actor in 1978 who agreed to be the female contestant picking from three bachelors on the TV show The Dating Game so that she could get a bit of media exposure. The reason this episode is significant though is not due to her at all; it is because one of the men behind the screen was Rodney Alcala who was later exposed of one of America’s worst serial killers. His appearance on the show occurred in the middle of a terrible killing spree in which he sexually assaulted and murdered between seven and one hundred and thirty women and girls. The second of those numbers is the suspected total, the first is what he was convicted for. Go figure! Alcala’s crimes make up a fair part of the plot but the film is more about his televised meeting with Bradshaw, or to be more accurate hers with him. This event was notable, it is certainly surprising that someone with such a violent secret life would do something so public, but ultimately it was incidental in the big scheme of things so why feature it and Bradshaw so heavily?

There are a number of reasons why this angle works for the film though. First off, it steals the focus away from him and his hideous toxic masculinity and, as also stressed in the title and the poster, shows women as the ones in the spotlight rather than just victims. The woman of the hour might be Cheryl Bradshaw, the words indeed come from how she is introduced on the show, but it could as easily be someone called Amy who was abducted by Alcala but then plays a key role in making sure he is caught. By spending so much time with Cheryl, who was not one of those that was hurt, this movie ensures that it is actually about the wider experience of women in a sexist world, not just those who suffer the most extreme levels of chauvinistic abuse. There is a third woman in the story too whose part shows the terrible inaction of those who should have stopped Alcala. This involves the police but another reason for spending so much time on the TV show is that the media is also shown to be implicit in this. There’s a wider point to be made from the fact, that while it is not laboured over, that the TV company put a man on a show where a woman could win a date with him, even though he had twice already been charged with assault and child molestation. ‘I’m sure they do background checks on them’ says one guy. ‘You’d think so wouldn’t you?’ answers the film. The message here is about the media’s regard for the wellbeing of women on reality shows and while things are better in 2024, well ‘you’d think so wouldn’t you’.

The two stand out moments in the movie are  around a woman’s escape from a man; one showing fortitude in exceptionally terrible circumstances and the other with a walk across a deserted car park at night, which is more common but no less worthy of focus. The distance of time really doesn’t lessen any of this either, it may be set four and a half decades ago but we are never under the impression that this threat and these behaviours are in the past. In fact there is a scene near the beginning when Cheryl is told by two male casting directors that she has no reason to refuse to do nude scenes as she clearly has nice breasts, which is taken straight from something that happened to Anna Kendrick, who plays Cheryl and directs the film, when she herself was 19.

With the conscious decision about what to put on screen, there are also elements we might have expected to see that are missing. Another version of these events might have featured the male lawyers who finally put the case against Alcala together and realised the extent of his crimes, but this stays a woman’s story.

Two years ago Kendrick headlined Alice, Darling, a movie that also exposed male oppression and the effect it had on women and now with her first film calling the shots she has done a similar thing, albeit it in a very different way. Kendrick was originally only attached to this to star but when Chloe Okuno had to drop out she took the reins and my assumption is that the concentration on the wider female experience comes in no small part from her. Under her direction Cheryl also has some strong feminist leanings, especially in the questions she asks the bachelors, that were certainly not demonstrated in the real show, footage of which is on YouTube below. This part may be a bit Hollywoodised then, but the portrayal of what women go through at the hands of bad men are no doubt only too relatable, at every end of the scale.

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