Movie review: Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut ‘Woman of the Hour’ is far from perfect

Hollywood doesn’t exactly have a surplus of prominent female directors, so it’s exciting to see actor Anna Kendrick making her directorial debut with “Woman of the Hour.”

Landing on Netflix this week after its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the truth-based thriller also sees Kendrick portraying a character inspired by a woman who, late in the 1970s, went on “The Dating Game,” when one of the three male contestants had been brutalizing and killing women for years.

Disappointingly, Kendrick is a bit better in front of the camera than behind it.

Known for prominent roles in films including “Up in the Air,” “The Accountant” and the “Pitch Perfect” flicks, she stepped in to helm the effort as the shooting date drew nearer without a director attached, according to the film’s production notes.

Penned by Ian McDonald (“Some Freaks”), “Woman of the Hour” tells the tale of the compulsively violent Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) from the perspectives of his victims and survivors. While that is laudable, it also leads to the tale lacking a narrative anchor.

Of the women, we spend the most time with Kendrick’s Sheryl, said to be a highly fictionalized version of the real “Dating Game” contestant, Cheryl Bradshaw. However, we don’t spend THAT much time with her, and, as a result, Rodney becomes the de facto – and certainly unintentional – main character. (That the long-haired Zovatto, whose film credits include “It Follows” and “The Pope’s Exorcist,” gives the strongest performance in the film serves only to cement this.)

We meet him in the unnerving opening sequence. It’s 1977, and he has lured a young woman into a scenic and, more importantly, remote part of Wyoming under the pretense of taking photos of her. She is vulnerable – her boyfriend has left her – and Rodney makes her feel beautiful.

And then, as we know he will, he attacks her.

This well-executed slice of “Woman of the Hour,” is evidence Kendrick can deliver a tense scene. She shows this again in a nail-biter of a sequence that follows Sheryl’s “Dating Game” appearance, after she has grown appropriately wary of Rodney.

Kendrick introduces us to Sheryl as she is struggling to make it as an actor in Los Angeles in 1978. At an audition, when she says she isn’t interested in doing nude scenes, one of the two men interviewing her says, “Oh,” gesturing toward her with a hand, “I’m sure they’re fine.”

Sheryl has a neighbor in her building, Pete Holmes’ Terry, who’s crushing on her and who listens to her, but not much else. She agrees to go on “The Dating Game” because her agent tells her it will be good for exposure.

Kendrick is at her best as Sheryl during the show taping, when the young woman chooses to have fun with the experience and mix it up with the three bachelors who remain out of her sight until she taps one for a date. Frustrating rigid (and fictional) show host Ed Burke (Tony Hale), Sheryl asks the young men high-minded questions such as, “What are girls for?”

Unfortunately, only the confident Rodney, who can come across as charming and disarming, handles them well.

Throughout “Woman of the Hour,” Rodney finds ways to get close to other women, including hip New Yorker Charlie (Kathryn Gallagher) and the struggling but complex Amy (Autumn Best). (The latter is prominent in the intriguing but somewhat frustrating final few minutes of the film.)

And then there’s Laura (Nicolette Robinson), who had gone to the police after her friend was killed by Rodney, though she wasn’t able to identify him. Laura, coincidentally, is in “The Dating Game” audience as Rodney sits on stage with an opportunity to be alone with another woman. Her subsequent efforts to get someone with the power to do something about this psychopath works as a heartbreaking reminder of how men have been able to get away with doing horrible things to women throughout the years.

While there is much to admire about “Women of the Hour,” it ultimately plays like a collection of parts more than a cohesive work, entertaining in spurts and only occasionally gripping.

That said, there’s certainly enough good here to make us hope Kendrick finds another chance to sit in the director’s chair again sooner rather than later.