This Review Contains Spoilers

Where to Watch: Netflix

Director: Anna Kendrick

Genre: Thriller/True Crime

Rating: ★★★★☆

Anna Kendrick, widely recognized for her role in the Pitch Perfect trilogy and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, made her directorial debut for the 2023 film ‘Woman of the Hour’. With over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, Kendrick’s retelling of the real-life true crime story of Rodney Alcala is painted in a near-perfect light. Categorized as a thriller/crime, Kendrick’s film retells the haunting true story of Rodney Alcala. The movie focuses less around the actual murders and more on the culture that allowed it to go unnoticed for so long.

Sheryl Bradshaw is introduced as a struggling actor in Los Angeles, who’s searching for any role she can get her hands on, while also dealing with the casual misogyny that women so often faced in the 70s. 

Kendrick stars as Sheryl Bradshaw, a contestant who appeared on The Dating Game in 1978. The Dating Game first aired in 1965. It featured a bachelorette asking questions to three secret bachelors who are hidden from her view, to decide which of the three she’d be interested in going on a date with. Sheryl plays the game, narrows down the bachelors, and wins a date with final contestant Rodney Alcala. Following the show, Rodney and Sheryl meet again in the parking lot, where he asks her to recite her phone number. She’d previously written it on a note and given it to him before leaving. When she can’t recite it from memory, Rodney narrows down that she’d given him a fake number. From here, Rodney’s real personality is shown, and it’s frightening. 

Early on in the movie, Rodney is painted as a ‘creep’, and Sheryl brushes him off. It’s later revealed that she had a very close encounter with someone extremely dangerous. Rodney Alcala was a serial killer and sex offender in the late 1970s. He was convicted and sentenced to death in California for the murder of five women, as young as 15 up to 32. But those were only the ones he’d been caught for. It’s rumored that in total, he killed up to 300 women over the course of a few decades. In the movie, we see that Rodney is a photographer, which is how he finds several of his victims. While waiting on death row in California, Rodney died from a heart attack at the age of 77.

Ultimately, Woman of the Hour is extremely successful in retelling the story of Rodney Alcala’s reign of terror across California. If you have yet to watch it, I strongly encourage you to do so.

Edited and Reviewed by Kien Powell