Reviews
‘Woman of the Hour’ TIFF Review – Anna Kendrick’s Unsettling Serial Killer Thriller
Anna Kendrick takes aim at the true crime serial killer story in her feature directorial debut, Woman of the Hour. A charming, kitschy ’70s set exploration of gender dynamics quickly gives way to an unnerving, suspenseful stranger-than-fiction tale of serial killer and rapist Rodney Alcala and his bizarre appearance as a bachelor on “The Dating Game.” Kendrick’s incisive vision, blending horror and humor with nonlinear storytelling, makes for an unshakable debut.
Kendrick pulls double duty for her debut, also starring as Cheryl Bradshaw, a struggling actress trying to carve out a career in California. Cheryl’s failed attempts to win over casting directors and gently rebuff her pushy neighbor put her at her wit’s end. That’s when her agent decides to land her a spot as the bachelorette on the popular live TV show “The Dating Game.” But it’s not just the typical stressors and anxieties of getting thrust into a live show with overbearing personalities to worry about; one of the eligible bachelors on her episode happens to be brazen killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) in the midst of a ruthless murder spree.
Screenwriter Ian MacAllister McDonald and Kendrick tell this harrowing story nonlinearly, methodically painting a stark picture of Alcala’s tactics as he targets vulnerable women across the country throughout the ’70s. Kendrick frames Alcala’s acts in an unconventional way, giving precedence to his luring of targets, focusing on the victims themselves, and avoiding any gratuitously graphic depictions of what happens to them next. While it means Women of the Hour is mostly bloodless, it effectively instills tension that only becomes increasingly more palpable and intense as Alcala’s path begins to converge with Cheryl’s. It also helps that Zovatto delivers a skin-crawling performance, a menacing figure that can charismatically disarm long enough to lower his target’s defenses right before it’s far too late.
Nicolette Robinson gives a heartrending turn as the sole person to recognize Alcala. But the film ultimately belongs to Autumn Best, who plays a young teen runaway who finds herself unwittingly ensnared by the killer. It’s Best’s potent portrayal of the trusting teen and subsequent violence endured that stays with you. Kendrick knows it, too; the actor-turned-director steps aside to let Best deliver a cathartic sucker punch that breaks your heart as much as it assures that Best is destined for stardom.
It’s a tricky thing to tell a true crime story, especially one centered around a prolific rapist/murderer as heinous as Alcala. Kendrick boldly defies expectations by introducing humor, then eschewing it altogether in favor of a heady examination of how Alcala got away with it for so long. It’s not horror in the traditional sense, but Kendrick wrings abject terror through intense sequences. Depicting some of Alcala’s crimes out of order only adds to the suspense, removing a sense of safety. So, too, does keeping the attention on the women he preys upon, lending dramatic weight that heightens the intensity.
Woman of the Hour does play it a bit loose with historical fact, but it’s such a minor note in such an auspiciously twisted and lean thriller anchored by powerful performances. Kendrick’s directorial debut dazzles with its incisive commentary, and the first-time director demonstrates clever instincts in knowing when to weaponize dark humor and when to let the dramatic moments breathe for maximum impact. Kendrick tosses out some of the more familiar serial killer conventions, and yet nothing is lost in terms of intensity and nerve-fraying sequences. It makes for an authentic, poignant, and unsettling debut.
Woman of the Hour made its World Premiere at TIFF. Release info TBA.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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