Anna Kendrick directs dating game with a killer in Woman of the Hour teaser

Anna Kendrick couldn’t let Ryan Murphy’s Monster series have all the fun. The Self Reliance actor is taking on her own historic serial killer in her directorial debut Woman Of The Hour, which tells the story of Rodney Alcala, also known as the Dating Game Killer.

Kendrick, who also produced the film, stars as Cheryl Bradshaw, a real-life Dating Game contestant who had the misfortune of selecting Alcala when he appeared on the show in the midst of a years-long murder spree in 1978. It really is a “stranger-than-fiction story,” as the film’s logline proclaims. Alcala was tried three times and eventually died in 2021 of unspecified natural causes.

The film’s first teaser seems to find Bradshaw and Alcala on their winning post-game date, a thoroughly uncomfortable affair that sees Bradshaw caught for trying to curve Alcala by the end of the evening. In real life, Bradshaw refused to go out with Alcala at all, saying she found him “creepy.” Noting that Alcala killed at least four people after his appearance, crime profiler Pat Brown suggested that this rejection could have had a profound effect on Alcala in a 2010 CNN article: “That is something he would not take too well. [Serial killers] don’t understand the rejection. They think that something is wrong with that girl: ‘She played me. She played hard to get.'”

(Unrelated to this film, which checks in on him years before, but for Alcala’s third trial in 2010, in which he stood suspect for five separate murders, he bizarrely chose to act as his own attorney and played Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” as part of his closing argument, which really warrants an entire film of its own. By this point, he also looked a lot like Nicolas Cage’s portrayal of Longlegs. Thoroughly creepy dude.) 

Woman Of The Hour originally premiered at TIFF in 2023. It also stars Tony Hale, Nicolette Robinson, Pete Holmes, Autumn Best, Kathryn Gallagher, and Kelley Jakle. The film streams on Netflix October 18.