Saturday, November 9, 2024

Movie Review: ‘Woman of the Hour’ is a Towering Directorial Debut for Anna Kendrick


Director: Anna Kendrick
Writer: Ian McDonald
Stars: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Zovatto, Tony Hale

Synopsis: Sheryl Bradshaw, a single woman looking for a suitor on a hit 1970s TV show, chooses charming bachelor Rodney Alcala, unaware that, behind the man’s gentle facade, he hides a deadly secret.


When an actor gets to direct a motion picture for the first time, the response is usually met with trepidation rather than excitement. Some high-profile stars have made a successful jump, while others have failed to do anything meaningful with the cinematic language. Recently, Kevin Costner has been living in delulu land by making his four-chapter Horizon: An American Saga that nobody outside Film Twitter (sorry, it’s true) wants to see, partly financed by his own money, while Brady Corbet is receiving the most significant praise of his directing career for his 215-minute VistaVision shot The Brutalist

Anna Kendrick Makes Directorial Debut With 'Woman of the Hour' Trailer

With Woman of the Hour, it’s now Anna Kendrick’s turn to make her mark in filmmaking. After a buzzy world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, crickets occurred until Netflix finally picked it up for a direct-to-streaming release in the United States on October 18. On the other hand, Canadians (like yours truly) got a wide, exclusive theatrical release from VVS Films and experienced Kendrick’s debut the way she intended. The result is a jaw-dropping drama that bursts with confidence at every turn to destabilize its viewers right as it opens with a cold and calculating sequence. 

But Kendrick’s confidence isn’t showy, a symptom that has plagued many actor-turned-director debuts. Instead of utilizing techniques to their fullest extent, the director usually indulges themselves in aesthetic platitudes and lose sight of the goals they wanted to lay out in their film. Kendrick never does so and immediately grabs our attention with its opening shot, a reflection of Rodney Alcala’s (Daniel Zovatto) camera as he takes a picture of the movie’s first victim. It’s hard to depict any serial murderer in a way that neither humanizes nor sympathizes with them. Unlike Ryan Murphy’s appalling Dahmer: Monster – The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which attempted to justify the actions of Jeffrey Dahmer by positing him as simply a misunderstood individual, Kendrick never falls into the traps that have plagued many movies and television series on pathological abusers and killers. 

There’s no humanity in Alcala, even if he attracts young female victims by showing a more vulnerable side of him before violently raping and killing them. It’s simply a façade, and we quickly realize this by the second Kendrick and cinematographer Zach Kuperstein showcase how he photographs and subtly objectifies women. 

Kendrick smartly does not linger on the killings either; she shows enough for us to understand the extent of his manipulation and disturbing pattern of extreme, sadistic violence. One such scene depicts Alcala pushing victim Amy (Autumn Best) off a cliff, but we don’t see the impact. Instead, we quickly cross-cut to flashbacks involving Rodney being friendly to them before committing his crimes and the ‘present-day’ storyline involving Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) attempting to make a big break within Hollywood. 

Her agent has tapped her to participate in an episode of The Dating Game and thinks it will bring her good exposure on screen. But the game is in and of itself deeply sexist, hosted by a man (Tony Hale) who seemingly takes pleasure in objectifying women and making jokes at their expense. Down on her luck, Sheryl reluctantly accepts and participates in the game in which she has to match between Bachelor 1 (Matt Visser), Bachelor 2 (Jedediah Goodacre), and Bachelor 3, who turns out to be Rodney. 

Now, Kendrick, being the intelligent filmmaker she is, has been constantly communicating to the audience with flashbacks that don’t serve to humanize the character of Rodney but instead to viscerally exacerbate the terror in such an upsetting way that the reveal of him being in the show hits like an actual punch to the stomach. This is felt through the eyes of audience member Laura (Nicolette Robinson), who recognizes Rodney from an event that led to the death of her best friend. While this parallel storyline doesn’t go as far as it should, how Kendrick visualizes discomfort when Rodney lurks out of the shadow feels more than a simple upset. 

It’s startling how she blocks the camera to create this sense of dread, in which women feel like there’s always someone lurking behind them. It’s blocking worthy of M. Night Shyamalan, always in service of the atmosphere and visual style that feeds the story Kendrick wants to tell. It makes moments of raw emotion all the more effective, particularly in its nighttime parking scene, which is so terrifying for reasons that transcend the mere stalker/prey setting, which is, in and of itself, distressing. 

This occurs throughout the entire movie. Kendrick shows us what she wants to show and operates with a complete mastery of the craft, with cathartic jumps in time that are always in service of her deeper message and are steeped in subtext and meaning. Of course, it’s not subtle, but it’s done in a way that humanizes the victims and gives them agency, even if they ultimately fall for Rodney’s fake persona. Kendrick treats Sheryl with the utmost compassion and respect. Sheryl is an average human being, unfortunately, led in a path of darkness that she won’t know until it’s far too late. But she sees past Rodney’s posture and knows he’s not who he presents himself as. 

Woman of the Hour' review: Anna Kendrick asks, 'what are girls for?'

To be honest, I kept waiting for Zovatto to show up in the film until I realized that he was playing Rodney all along after forty minutes or so had passed. That’s how good he is here, a petrifying display of torment that effectively crawls under your skin and goes beyond directly scaring you. This is riveting, psychologically active work that constantly changes depending on the victims he chooses, which makes him all the more chilling in front of any woman. And as Sheryl, Kendrick delivers a career-best performance that she unfortunately had not had the privilege to show until now. 

I was never a massive fan of Kendrick, the actor. But it’s not entirely her fault as the movies that she starred in did her no favors (The Twilight Saga and Pitch Perfect films, for example, while commercially successful, aren’t very good). Here, she’s not only in complete control of her movie but of her lead performance, which is often very funny (she’s got a rather dark sense of humor that very much plays in this critic’s comedic sensibilities), but, more importantly, quietly devastating. 

However, the most impressive aspect of Woman of the Hour isn’t necessarily Kendrick’s performance (it’s very good, don’t get me wrong), but in how she operates her film. Rarely have we seen a directorial debut this towering, controlled in what she wants to show inside the frames (and leave outside), and confident in how she structures its multiple storylines (sprinkled with images that tip the hat to some of her cinematic influences). It may not reinvent the wheel, but it’s so assuredly well-crafted and constantly captivating to watch that one can’t help but admire the work Kendrick has put in as a filmmaker in such an impeccable debut. Here’s hoping her next directorial effort comes out much sooner than later. 

Grade: A

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