The final stretch of Woman of the Hour strikes a delicate balance. There’s a moment of triumph, as teen runaway Amy (Autumn Best) escapes from serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) and turns him in to the police. But there’s also tragedy: As the film’s end titles reveal, Alcala will be released on bail and kill again. 

Both of those feelings are present in the film’s final moment, a tortured gasp from Amy that’s interrupted as director Anna Kendrick cuts to black. “As incongruous as it is, that’s Sondheim,” Kendrick, who also stars in the film, tells Tudum, referring to legendary composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. “That’s the chord resolving at the end of Into the Woods, and then one last ‘I wish’ ringing out. Because there isn’t a perfect resolution: That character has survived, but it’s not as simple as ‘She’s going to be fine now.’ It’s meant to evoke dissonance at the very least.”

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That dissonance is all over Woman of the Hour: a serial killer winning a dating game show, a date with death. Ahead, we dive into how the film wraps up the stories of aspiring actor Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) and Rodney Alcala — and what happened next in the characters’ real lives. 

Leah Gallo

Who is Rodney Alcala in Woman of the Hour?

It may seem too strange to be true, but the film’s depiction of Alcala’s and Bradshaw’s initial meeting as contestants on The Dating Game is based on reality. Yes, a serial killer really appeared on — and won — the game show in the 1970s amid a spree of brutal murders. The real-life Alcala had already killed at least three women before appearing on the show, and he killed at least two more after his episode — as the film notes, some have estimated the number of his victims to be as high as 130. 

For the filmmakers, Alcala was a jumping-off point for exploring a larger cultural narrative. “He wasn’t the thing that interested me,” screenwriter Ian McDonald tells Tudum. “The context around him was the thing that I found really interesting. He seemed to represent something that we were kind of wrestling with as a country at the time, which is ordinary people looking the other way so that bad people could get away with bad behavior.”

The film depicts this slow-motion tragedy throughout. In one subplot, Laura (Nicolette Robinson), a friend of one of Alcala’s victims, recognizes him on The Dating Game. It’s a moment fictionalized for the film to represent the many instances of ordinary people looking the other way. “Laura really functions as kind of a representation of all the people that tried to raise the alarm and were ignored,” Kendrick says. “There are so many heroes in this story, but the heroes were outnumbered and outgunned by incompetence and negligence and a culture that did not prioritize victims.”

McDonald agrees. “Rodney Alcala really seems to have flouted a lot of his worst tendencies,” he says. “And so it wasn’t that he was being sneaky, it’s that other people were … actively looking the other way.”

When does Woman of the Hour take place?

The film jumps around in time to track several of Alcala’s crimes:

1977: Woman of the Hour opens with Alcala’s murder of a pregnant young woman in Wyoming after he photographs her.

1978: The film leaps forward to Sheryl Bradshaw’s life in Hollywood, and to the year of her close call with Alcala during his 1978 appearance on The Dating Game. It’s the story’s narrative center, and a sequence the film keeps returning to.

1979: The story picks up after Alcala’s Dating Game appearance, when he picks up teenage runaway Amy in San Gabriel, California. This is another subplot the film circles back to throughout.

1978: Back to The Dating Game, as Sheryl prepares for her appearance.

1971: A leap back to Alcala’s time in New York City, where he kills a young woman after helping her move.

1978: The Dating Game begins with Sheryl and her three suitors. Laura sits down in the audience.

1977: A flashback to 1977. While working at the Los Angeles Times, Alcala is questioned by the police in connection with another serial killer’s crimes.

1978: Back on The Dating Game, Laura recognizes Alcala as the man who was last seen with a murdered friend of hers. She tries to warn the production. Meanwhile, Alcala wins the date with Sheryl.

1979: Alcala and Amy continue their drive, and he reveals his true nature.

1978: Alcala and Sheryl have an uncomfortable date, and he menaces her in the parking lot. Only the intrusion of a few potential witnesses prevents Alcala from killing her. Laura makes up with her boyfriend and reports Alcala’s TV appearance to the police; Sheryl moves home.  

1979: In the aftermath of Alcala’s assault, Amy sees her chance to escape. When Alcala stops for gas, she manages to get to a nearby diner and call the police.

The period setting required McDonald and Kendrick to reconstruct Alcala’s Dating Game appearance for today’s viewers. “He’s charming by 1978 standards, but 2024 audiences would watch that and be like, ‘He’s a serial killer,’ ” McDonald says. “We wanted to make sure that modern audiences basically got to experience the same kind of emotional journey that Sheryl did, so we fictionalized his dialogue in service of pairing it a little bit more with modern sensibilities.”

Sheryl also got a slight update, with inspiration from another episode of The Dating Game. “I saw one … where there was a woman who was asking questions that were clearly combative,” McDonald says. “She was trying to pick a fight with the host, saw the show as sexist, and she really disapproved of it, and she was making that disapproval known by the questions she was asking.” McDonald transposed that bachelorette’s style onto Sheryl’s character — fictionalization with a core of truth.

How is Rodney Alcala caught in Woman of the Hour? 

Alcala is undone by Amy (Best), the runaway he picks up in San Gabriel. After driving her into the middle of the desert, he assaults her and — in a perverse moment of self-pity — breaks down into tears. “The story where the young drifter wakes up after having been attacked, and she looks over at him, and he’s crying — there’s a way in which I still don’t quite know what to make of that,” McDonald says. “I don’t think these sorts of people are really capable of empathy. So I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s probably something more [like] shame or embarrassment on some level.”

Whatever motivated Alcala’s tears, it gives Amy an opportunity to escape. She flips the script on her would-be killer and begs him not to tell anyone about what has happened, which somehow convinces him to spare her. Then, once they pull into a gas station, she runs for help. 

Deep in the desert, Alcala is finally arrested. It’s a landscape that Kendrick returns to multiple times throughout the film, especially in her depictions of the murders. “It felt important to me to connect these women to nature for several reasons, but one of which was, I kind of wanted to put them in places that spoke to the vastness of their life beyond this moment,” she says. “It’s a 90-minute movie. There’s only so much screen time that everybody can have. And I wanted — in spite of the way that we’re meeting them — I wanted their environment to reflect the beauty and the fullness of their whole life before that and what they should have had after.” 

Leah Gallo

What happens to Sheryl in Woman of the Hour?

Sheryl, as played by Kendrick, lives after suffering through a date with Alcala, barely avoiding his violent nature. It’s a small victory for women in the midst of his crime spree. After appearing on The Dating Game, Sheryl decides she isn’t cut out for Hollywood and moves home — but not before standing up for herself one more time, with her pushy neighbor (Pete Holmes). 

“Ian and I were debating whether maybe there’s a little bit of dialogue or a conversation between Sheryl and her neighbor at the end of the movie, and nothing was feeling right,” Kendrick recalls. “And Ian suddenly suggested like, ‘Well, what if Sheryl just stands her ground in the hallway, and he has to move around her?’ I think I threw my highlighter across the room — I was so excited.”

It’s a moment that defines the final act of Woman of the Hour. McDonald “has this great way of illustrating the complexity of a victory that’s small, but it’s meaningful to that character,” Kendrick says. Amy and Sheryl, for all the pain they’ve been through, will push on.

Woman of the Hour is now streaming on Netflix.

Anna Kendrick on Her Childhood, Woman of the Hour, and More on Skip Intro

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