It can get a bit repugnant, the endless lurid recycling in new movies, books, documentaries, TV series, and so forth of certain “true crime” serial-killer legacies. So many of those efforts are more exploitative than insightful—I mean, what is left to glean from the grisly sagas of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the Manson “family,” et al., beyond exploiting their victims’ memory for another buck? Still, the occasional depiction transcends such cash-in callousness. One of the best films of 2022 was Tobias Lindholm’s The Good Nurse, which had Jessica Chastain as the real-life hospital employee who realized colleague Charles Cullen (played by Eddie Redmayne) was euthanizing patients—possibly as many as 400—from sheer demented spite, those crimes covered up by suspecting institutions too fearful of lawsuits to end his killing spree by contacting police.
One of the best movies of this year turns out to be another feature going straight to Netflix: Woman of the Hour, about another serial killer convicted of a far smaller number of murders than he may have actually committed over several years’ transient span. It is unknown exactly how many girls and women Rodney Alcala raped and killed over at least a decade’s course before he was finally imprisoned without bail mid-1979. (A major subplot here has Nicolette Robinson as someone who by sheer chance recognizes him as the person who probably killed her friend, and her infuriated inability to galvanize authorities’ attention underlines how such indifference allowed Alcala to continue accruing victims across the nation.)
The hook on which Hour hangs is a bizarre footnote in the perp’s career: In 1978 he appeared on long-running ABC, then syndicated program The Dating Game, in which one eligible young “bachelorette” posed innuendo-laden questions to three bachelors on the other side of a barrier before choosing a “winner.” It was a forerunner in a sense to “reality” shows like Love Island, with hottie contestants similarly recruited from the ranks of aspiring young actors and models, though they were seldom presented as such. Anna Kendrick plays Cheryl Bradshaw, whose acting career is going nowhere in the City of Angels—we witness some typically degrading auditions that never lead to an actual part—so her agent gets her “cast” on an episode of the show for “visibility.”
This gig, too, is somewhat humiliating, as she’s expected to giggle like an idiot at the “naughty” prefab banter, though after a point (to the considerable irritation of the smarmy host played by Tony Hale) she goes off-script. One of the bachelors she’s to choose from is a tongue-tied dolt; another too slick for his own good. But a third says all the right things to woo her, ensuring (as he duly brags to Bachelor #2) that he “always gets the girl.”
Unfortunately, that smooth-talking fellow is Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto from It Follows and Don’t Breathe), whom we’ve already seen the very dark “other” side of. Often posing as a fashion photographer, he has lured various young females to brutal peril, from an NYC stewardess (Kathryn Gallagher) in 1971 to a teenage runaway (Autumn Best) in 1979. Made wary by the routine misogyny of LA’s showbiz industry, Cheryl seems unlikely to be so easily taken in. But then any paths-crossing with the deceptively pleasant, then psychotically hostile Rodney (who reportedly had a very high IQ, alongside various psychological disorders) could be highly dangerous.
Kendrick, who played another character trapped by a predatory narcissist in the effective Alice, Darling last year, also makes her directorial debut here. As in that film, Hour emphasizes not overt violence or other abuse so much as the trust women extend to men who appear to mean them no harm… and how easily that can be played upon by someone who does. Scenes of Alcala with his victims are hair-raising, because Zovatto does the sociopathic buttering-up so well, and we see his prey fatally lower their defenses in response.
By contrast, the sequences with Cheryl in 1978 are a little too up-to-the-moment in sensibility—an otherwise astute, cleverly structured script by Ian McDonald (who wrote and directed the very good 2016 indie drama Some Freaks) gives her perhaps a bit too much wised-up agency in dealing with Me Decade sexism. But it all works like a poisoned charm once this chronologically cross-cutting narrative arrives at its dual climaxes, separate nail-biting close calls for two women in different years towards the end of this villain’s homicidal run. Kendrick’s instincts behind the camera are razor-sharp. These setpieces are all the more harrowing for being so quiet, their violence not on-screen but palpably coiled in readiness. Woman of the Hour begins streaming on Netflix this Fri/18.
Another true crime tale is dramatized in veteran French writer-director (and frequent actor) Cedric Kahn’s The Goldman Case, though this one deals exclusively with the courtroom aftermath. Arieh Worthalter has won a clutch of awards for an electric portrayal of Pierre Goldman, a radical leftist agitator born to parents in the French Resistance; his own political activities took him to Cuba and Venezuela in the late 1960s. When he returned to France, he committed armed robberies to fund a hedonistic lifesthyle—but vehemently denied involvement in one that resulted in the deaths of two female pharmacists, saying he would never shoot unarmed women.
Five years after conviction, he won a new trial in 1976, claiming himself “the victim of an injustice” rigged by police and anti-Semites. By then he had published a book written in prison, attracting some high-profile supporters, including Sartre, Francoise Sagan, and movie star Simone Signoret, who attended this second defense. Those raucous proceedings—the French justice system seems to permit far more argumentative cross-talk than our own—are the whole of Case, which almost never leaves the room crowded with lawyers, witnesses and spectators.
The lack of depicted backstory may render Goldman’s story (let alone his guilt or innocence) somewhat murky to viewers lacking any prior acquaintance. Still, it’s all engrossing, because he is such a fiery, filter-free personality—alternately raging, self-loathing, arrogant, repentant, and accusatory—and because the divisiveness of his character as well as supposed deeds draws equally vivid response from other well-played figures. The long closing arguments here are so intense, they’re actually exciting, rather than dully “theatrical.” The Goldman Case opens at SF’s Vogue and the Smith Rafael Film Center in Marin next Wed/23.
Moving from the reenacted to the real-time, Michele Josue’s Nurse Unseen provides an overview of the outsized role of Filipinos in US nursing. As a side effect to our colonial relationship towards the Philippines, Filipinas wound up caring for many an American soldier in the various Pacific war “theaters” during and after WW2, leading to training regimens that made them uniquely desirable foreign workers when Stateside facilities suffered a nursing shortage as of the 1950s. (In fact some discriminatory immigration laws were lifted or altered largely to allow that gap’s filling.) Such professionals earned far better wages than they could have at home, allowing them to support families left behind—and some of those families eventually emigrated, too.
Still under 5% of the overall US nursing population, Filipino workers nonetheless comprised nearly a third of that vocation’s coronavirus deaths, underlining their heavy assignment in the highest-risk caregiving duties of health emergencies. Despite that sacrifice, however, they also suffered the supreme injustice of anti-Asian violence scapegoating anyone whom morons thought looked like they might somehow be ethnically tied to “kung flu” (as one particular orange-hued moron frequently called it). Nurse Unseen recalls the worst of the COVID crisis while also providing a general tribute to “our Titos and Titas on the front lines.” It even has room for good-humored protest at the fact that long-running TV medical melodramas like ER have never had a significant Filipino character. The documentary feature opens a limited run at SF’s Marina Theatre on Thurs/17.
Speaking of contagions, a couple new horror movies offer variations on that most prominent screen epidemic: Zombies. In Die Alone, Canadian writer-director Lowell Dean makes an about-face from his goofy WolfCop films, crafting a very serious post-apocalyptic tale. Here, some sort of plant-based virus thought to be “Nature purging itself of mankind’s destruction” has decimated much of our species. Lanky Ethan (Douglas Smith) and girlfriend Emma (Kimberly-Sue Murray) flee the city, perhaps too late, seeking shelter in the countryside. But they get separated, and a dazed Ethan is plagued by bouts of amnesia when he stumbles into farmhouse of armed, ornery Mae (Carrie-Anne Moss). While flashes of the past do come back to him, the only thing Ethan can stay focused on is wanting to find Emma.
There’s an irony to that quest which finally lends “Die Alone” considerable punch, even a tragic dimension. (Hopefully without spoiling anything, it is notable that the ending here is equivalent to that of the classic British folk song “Barbara Allen.”) But it takes quite a humorlessly long time for it to get there, treading overfamiliar narrative ground before things get interesting in the later going. Well-crafted and acted, the film is worth staying with. Yet despite the superficial novelty of the plant angle, it doesn’t stray far enough from zombie-flick conventions to make a truly memorable impression. Quiver Distribution launches it on digital and On Demand platforms Fri/18.
Likewise arriving on streaming platform Shudder that day is MadS from David Moreau, who made a splash with the effective home-invasion thriller Ils aka Them (co-directed with Xavier Palud). In a French suburb, callow youth Romain (Milton Riche) kicks off his birthday celebrations by scoring some drugs. On the drive home, alas, he finds his convertible clambered into by a mute, panicked woman in bandages and hospital smock. That’s bad enough, but it gets worse fast—not only does she soon stab herself to death, she appears unable to stay dead. A small army of presumed government fixers in full Hazmat suits pursue her… shooting to kill anyone she may have come in contact with, to boot.
As Romain is quickly dragged off to a crowded house party in his honor, that body count will skyrocket. After a time, our perspective shifts to his girlfriend Ana (Laurie Pavy). Later, it shifts again to the mutual friend he’s cheating on her with, Julia (Lucille Guillaume). MadS’ gimmick is that it’s all shot in a single take—almost 90 minutes of nonstop forward motion via car, truck, moped, foot, and so forth, with the characters mostly fleeing for their lives. Though as the mystery contagion (apparently a laboratory experiment gone wrong) travels, it also makes them prone to homicidal urges.
This sort of thing has been done before, and will be done again. The trick is for the intensity of the action to keep us roped in, rather than becoming well, just a too-obvious trick of actor improv, mobile camera and elaborate crew preparations. It didn’t quite work for me—I was too aware of how much depended on our being engrossed by the histrionics (crazy-laughing, etc.) of thespians hard-pressed not to lapse into hammy acting-class fireworks that are all show and no tell. Moreau makes an impressive stab at pulling off such a high-stakes, Rube Goldbergian exercise—albeit cheating a bit with a soundtrack extensively worked in post. Still, when you never stop seeing the seams, as here, I’m not sure that effort is worth it.
