Woman of the Hour.

Woman of the Hour is the directorial debut for actor Anna Kendrick, who also stars in this loosely adapted story about the contestant on the TV show The Dating Game who chose as her date a serial killer – and probably narrowly eclipsed dying at his hands. I’ve never been a fan of Kendrick as an actor, but she shows significant promise behind the camera, elevating a script that overplays its hand repeatedly to make for a solid thriller.

Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) is a struggling actress in 1978 whose agent books her a spot on The Dating Game, which often had its four seats – one woman and three bachelors – filled with would-be actors and comedians. It is her misfortune to have Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), a smart, charming photographer who has already killed multiple women in sadistic fashion, not just as one of her three bachelors, but, as the film tells it, the most charismatic and suave of them. (One of the other bachelors on her episode was an unknown actor named Jed Mills, although the film never names him or the third man.) A huge portion of the film’s running time takes place on the show’s set as we watch Sheryl navigate the ridiculous process and deal with the obnoxious host (an underutilized Tony Hale) while Alcala keeps giving the best answers. It’s only afterwards, when the two meet off set, that Sheryl sees more of his personality and becomes sufficiently creeped out to call off the date – but not before their interaction takes a very scary turn.

Woman of the Hour actually gives Alcala a substantial amount of screen time, which establishes his character in important ways but also makes us privy to some disturbing scenes. It opens with a an unfortunately fairly accurate depiction of one of Alcala’s murders, where he strangled his victim, resuscitated her, raped her, and then killed her again, and later we see another murder and a kidnapping, also close to the true story. On the one hand, it shows the audience just what Alcala is capable of, and since most viewers will know going in – or could probably just guess – that he’s going to be her pick, it shows that the stakes are life or death. On the other hand, it’s macabre, and leering, not quite in a celebratory way, but in a way that ends up establishing Alcala as at least as much of a central character as Bradshaw.

Contributing to this imbalance is Zovatto’s performance; he makes Alcala’s ability to charm everyone, notably women, totally plausible, overshadowing everyone else on screen except when he and Kendrick are on opposite sides of the game show set. That’s also where the script begins to diverge from reality; the actual dialogue on the show was typically racy and oversexed, but in the movie, Bradshaw ditches the questions she’s been given and engages in witty, highbrow banter with Alcala while mocking the other two bachelors. It makes Bradshaw into a bit of an implausible heroine, while it shows a different Alcala than the one Bradshaw and viewers saw. The film veers further and further from reality, and more into unnecessary melodrama, right up through the text over the closing scene, which is a complete fabrication where none was necessary. (And yes, that especially annoyed me.)

This could easily have gone off the rails once the story gets the characters on set, where we get another subplot as an audience member recognizes Alcala as the man who she believes killed her friend. Kendrick handles the scene-shifting and the need to maintain the pace extraordinarily well for a first-time director – or any-time director. Once we’re on the show, the script tries so hard to ratchet up the tension, and Kendrick manages to keep it in check until the parking lot scene after the show, where the tension is real, and earned. It’s the best scene in the movie, one where so much happens without a word spoken, and takes this one woman’s bizarre experience and uses it to express something far more universal: the fear of violence that women face even in seemingly routine interactions with men, like a simple date, because of the pervasiveness of violent men.

Woman of the Hour could so easily have ended up a woman-in-jeopardy Lifetime movie in different hands. Kendrick wouldn’t have seemed like the person to steer it straight, but by taking a hyperventilating script just down a notch, she turned it into a more interesting and riveting film.