Netflix at first glance Woman of the Day is another true crime fiction that highlights our decades-long preoccupation with American serial killers.

Directed by Anna Kendrick, who also plays the heroine Sheryl Bradshaw, the film reconstructs the crimes of serial rapist and murderer Rodney Alcala, aka the “dating game killer”. Alcala took part in (and won) a famous competition television matchmaking program In 1978, in the middle of a years-long murder spree.

The film examines historical sexual violence at both the individual and institutional levels. It reveals the intense physical and psychological cruelty Alcala inflicts on his victims, as well as the cruelty and misogyny of the patriarchal culture that enables such behavior.

Woman of the Hour is a groundbreaking text: the first feminist true crime film to achieve commercial success since the #MeToo movement gained momentum in 2017.

see and be seen

The Woman of the Hour turns sadism and voyeurism on its head”male gazeTraditional true crime by forcing viewers to identify with the female victim rather than the male perpetrator.

As film theorist and gender studies scholar Sarah Projanksy observes in her influential book Watching Rape:

Depictions of sexual violence in most horror and crime thrillers carry the risk of spreading and reproducing erotic violence against women, even if victims object.

But Kendrick’s directorial debut doesn’t romanticize Alcala or glorify his crimes. There are no victims or moaning victims shown in various stages of undress.

Instead, through careful framing and close-ups, we see Alcala’s victims’ panicked discomfort with the dangers of dating, the damaging effects of casual misogyny, and the ever-present threat of male vulnerability.

as Margaret Atwood foretoldWhile men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them.

“Did you feel seen?” Alcala asks Sheryl, after the aspiring actress appears with Alcala on The Dating Game to be “seen.”

“I felt like I was being looked at,” Sheryl replies.

The tense interactions between predator and prey create almost unbearable tension for viewers who have already seen Alcala’s superficial charisma and charm.

Alcala was an amateur photographer who often exploited his victims’ desire to be understood and “seen”, luring them under the pretense of “being seen”. He takes pictures of them.

The film’s disturbing dialogue and clever use of visual metaphor frame women as objects to be looked at, but with a twist: the female characters are aware that they are being followed and trapped (even if the awareness comes too late).

Kendrick craftily yet devastatingly presents Alcala’s horrific rape and torture from the victim’s perspective. The camerawork underscores the victims’ feelings of shock and surprise, but never in a voyeuristic or gratuitous way.

A game of murder and romance

The Woman of the Hour implicitly suggests that part of Alcala’s perverse pleasure in killing comes from gamifying the process.

In the film, Alcala strangles and then reanimates his victims, sometimes several times, before re-exposing them to the horror of his own violence and the knowledge of their own deaths. Her appearance in The Dating Game is the ultimate power move in the game of murder and romance.

“I always get the girl,” Alcala says, grinning at a fellow contestant.

His challenge extends not just to blind date Sheryl on the other side of the screen, but to the entire studio audience and viewers at home, too.

But the film makes clear that romance was never Alcala’s goal. Instead, he uses the game of romance to take advantage of his victims’ vulnerability and trust. In this respect, the game is played in his favor.

When a woman in the audience recognizes Alcala as the man who raped and murdered her friend years ago, she tries to report her concerns to the show’s producers, but is deceived by a security guard. In another act of cruel male deception, the guard tells her to wait for the “senior manager” who she knows is actually the night janitor.

Women, it seems, are pawns in the patriarchal game of 1970s America; During this period, women’s accounts of sexual abuse and harassment were not trusted and their safety was routinely disregarded.

Alcala after #MeToo

In Woman of the Hour, the women who survive Alcala’s violence are the ones who perceive the mastery of his romantic script before flipping the script and presenting it back to him in an equally convincing manner.

When teenage runaway Amy wakes up in the remote desert after Alcala brutally rapes and assaults her, he outsmarts her by asking her to keep what happened a secret.

Amy lulls Alcala into a false sense of security, convincing him to forgive her. When Alcala pulls into a gas station, he runs to a nearby restaurant and calls the police, who arrive and arrest him.

Finally Kendrick message very clear: “There is no happy ending in a story like this.”

This post-#MeToo take on Alcala’s violent crimes is a commentary on systemic misogyny, including the failures of the police and judicial systems that allowed a serial killer on national television to evade detection.

Woman of the hour, Kendrick, refuses to look the other way.