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Woman of the Hour

by Lauren James on November 11, 2026

I like this better in the plural.

Woman of the Hour marks the directorial debut of Anna Kendrick, who also takes center stage as Sheryl Bradshaw, a smart, uncompromising, struggling actress who hopes her spot on The Dating Game will let her make ends meet for another month and even—though this is a more distant hope—translate into better work later on. But one of the bachelors behind the screen is serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto). For right now, though, he’s giving all the right answers.

The title seems to refer to Sheryl, and indeed, it’s explicitly trotted out to describe her gameshow moment in the sun. Still, despite a typically adept performance from Kendrick, Sheryl is the least interesting part of the film, and her story, through true in broad terms, feels like a strained, self-conscious vehicle for as many points about misogyny in the entertainment industry—and elsewhere—that the screenplay can fit in. There are multiple moments when conveying a certain vulnerability or even ache would make her scenes resonate more, in part by giving her a much-needed interiority: Is she ever even close to caving and agreeing to a nude scene, for example? Does she weigh her discomfort with it and her long-term career goals against the short-term need for money or a much-needed screen credit? When she reluctantly sleeps with a friend she’s not truly attracted to, is it out of desperate loneliness, looking to preserve the one connection she has in the city, or is it sheer awkwardness-muffling expediency? What does she like about acting, and is there any clarification worth drawing out about her reluctance to play a bubbly airhead as her own, real-named persona vs. her potential discomfort with playing one at all? When she asks the on-set stylists if she went too far with her Dating Game ad libs, is it because she’s nervous about appearing too smart and “difficult” (given the pervasive industry sexism she’s well-aware of) or because she feels guilty that some of her questions, which needled the obvious intellectual incapacities of dim-but-harmless Bachelor #1, were borderline cruel? Who’s to say? I suspect Kendrick could answer all these questions, both as a director and a performer, but the script lets all this potential meat go cold on the bone.

And maybe it should, because despite that title drop, this isn’t Sheryl’s story. But if the film knows that—if it understands that her character arc is more or less beside the point—then why waste so much time on it? Presumably, the answer is twofold: because the real-life Alcala is sometimes known as the Dating Game Killer, making the focus more marketable, and because no other role would be big enough to make this a star vehicle.

It’s unfortunate, because the film positively shines whenever it abandons The Dating Game.1 The vignettes of Alcala’s crimes are incredible: moving, empathetic, beautifully short horror stories that find, at every turn, unshowy but effective ways to prioritize the victims’ perspective and humanity. We see smart, funny, vulnerable, and varied women—our women of the hours—and their encounters with Alcala are all structured differently and in a way that implicitly addresses one of the common refrains about true crime: that it teaches women to protect ourselves. Sometimes, maybe. Sure. But this fictionalized Alcala, at least, excels at offering up a naturalistic, disarming charm.2 On a long enough timeline, he’ll say something that makes a woman’s guard go (back) up, but who knows where you’ll be when that moment comes? How long are you supposed to go on not trusting someone, even if this is what happens when you don’t? Instead of being invited to judge the women and find them insufficiently careful, we’re placed into their experience of judging Alcala and repeatedly put into the moment when that judgment tips over into the certainty of danger. Kendrick and cinematographer Zach Kuperstein put together some of the movie’s best shots in these sequences, from filming a gauzy blur through an improvised blindfold to moving to a distance that feels as gutting as it does clinical, a distance that emphasizes that no, no one’s coming. A key moment in the first murder involves an absolutely ruthless use of the frame itself. It’s a shame this was a Netflix movie, because these parts are cinematic as hell and Zodiac-level in their construction.

The best of them may be the one with Amy (Autumn Best3), the teenage runaway who leads to Alcala’s capture. Best gives a terrific performance, especially in the closing section, when she’s all enormous, expressive eyes and guarded physicality as she uses every bit of her intelligence and insight to appease Alcala and lull him, her near-murderer, into feeling “safe” with her. (And as smart as Amy is, it’s still only luck that she started breathing again, or that she started breathing again when Alcala was coming down from his murderous high and, in his crash, feeling guilty. There’s not much sense of safety-in-identification here, either. Just horror, awe, and admiration.) It’s a heart-stopping sequence, and it would make a stronger core than the Dating Game scenes, which would’ve been better as a much smaller part of the mosaic. Taken as a series of short films disconnected from that framing, this would be exceptional.

  1. I suspect that a slightly bungled plot where Nicolette Robinson’s Laura, in the show’s audience, recognizes Alcala as her friend’s rapist and murderer and tries in vain to bring this to someone’s attention, is handled badly by virtue of existing in the same space. There would be a lot to mine from Laura’s panic and the racialized, as well as gendered, reactions that panic receives. But like Sheryl, she’s forced to be less a character and more a stand-in—Women Whose Warnings about Alcala Were Tragically Ignored—and that’s exactly the kind of thing that seemed to bring out the screenwriter’s worst instincts. ↩︎
  2. Credit where credit is due: The main plot I’ve been maligning semi-addresses this, when the stylist tells Sheryl that her tough questions have only been asking what every woman wants to know, which is whether or not (or when) a man will hurt her. And the thing is, Alcala answers all those questions correctly and in such a way that even the guarded Sheryl is initially won over. There’s no cheat sheet to avoiding a horrible fate; luck, more than anything else, separates the survivors from the dead. ↩︎
  3. Based on this movie alone, I’m irate she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. ↩︎

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