Review: Woman of the Hour

Suspense and Disbelief

By Waleska Antunes

One of cinema’s most precious concepts, in general, is the concept of “suspension of disbelief”. This concept, stemming from other arts, is the capacity to temporarily discontinue life in the real world and engage in the narrative of the world of fantasy; the lies of reality and fiction are wiped out and the spectator manages to make the incredible credible.

In Anna Kendrick’s debut as director Woman of the Hour (US, 2023, Expectations) she fragments the suspension of disbelief in images constantly made tense by the suspense and evil yet to come, and disbelief with regard to the women who motivate the drama.

The film introduces the personage Rodney Alcala, a murderer who committed crimes between 1968 and 1979, pretending to be a photographer and seducing women to kill them. The number of victims is unknown to this day. Alcala doubles the bet and decides to become candidate of a courtship programme called The Dating Show, a late-night reality show of the 1970s.

In this gesture, Kendrick presents the perspective of the women who were Alcala’s victims. As such, it is in default of North-American media of the 1970s, which robs women, victims of crime, of their physical reality, transforming them into objects of speculation and fetish – like Sharon Tate, bloody and gutted, stamped on long editorials about her murder -, this film devolves them, if uncomfortably, a right to their own salvation. These women, who occupy spaces as if they were beasts of prey, are seldom heard and often ridiculed when they point out the hostility of the environment in which they are being inserted in degrading situations, like the Sheryl character who is asked to ‘pretend you are stupid’ to gain the audience’s sympathy, or Laura, intimidated at seeing her friend’s executioner on the stage. It is in this failure of the man and in the disbelief of the world, that there is a possibility of escaping the inescapable: death.

One of the greatest lessons that Anna Kendrick leaves us is that the film does not try to save the women from their calamities; as they can, after all, save themselves.