Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour, now on Netflix, takes snapshots of the 1970s, none of them flattering. In 1971, a young woman moving into a new apartment enlists a stranger to help haul some furniture. He helps, hangs out for a beer, flirts with her, and attacks her. In 1977, that same man strangles a woman more than halfway across the country. In 1979, he picks up a teenage runaway. In 1978, he appears on The Dating Game.
Some of this time-skipping, as well as the ominousness of all these segments, recalls the quiet, inescapable menace of David Fincher’s Zodiac. Compared to Fincher, Kendrick is more interested in the personal details than the grist of subsequent investigations – though part of the problem, she implies, is that there isn’t much grist to begin with. Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) was killing and assaulting women and girls for at least a decade before he was actually permanently ensnared by the justice system. That’s why he was walking free in ’78, able to appear on The Dating Game (and win, even!) opposite actress Cheryl Bradshaw, who Kendrick plays in the movie. A single game-show appearance and the attendant frustrations of a struggling actress aren’t necessarily enough for a full feature, so Kendrick weaves together Bradshaw’s story with other women who encounter Alcala and find their efforts to escape, or even just alert authorities, largely thwarted.
This unconventional structure keeps viewers on their toes and builds tension across the different storylines. There’s a sequence in a parking lot toward the end of Cheryl’s storyline that’s particularly stressful, not least because it’s on the heels of her minor triumph, where she temporarily wrests control of The Dating Game from its sexist host (played by Tony Hale) and delivers her own questions, and her own accompanying banter, to the dopey guys assembled as bachelors one through three. Chillingly, the guy with the most “right” answers is also the serial killer.
Yet as clever as Kendrick is behind the camera, and absolutely winning as she is in front of it, her character also demonstrates a major strategy Woman of the Hour uses for allowing its characters to fight back against the patriarchy: Simply have them behave more like women in 2024, aware of and openly frustrated by institutional sexism that dismisses them. Of course, plenty of women in the ’70s had these experiences, and the accompanying awareness and frustrations. But Cheryl Bradshaw notably did not appear to go off-script and show off her intelligence on The Dating Game to engage in witty, winking banter with her clueless suitors, and Kendrick does a bit of her own time-traveling in every scene where she’s clocking a man’s entitlement; suddenly there’s an invisible contemporary thought bubble over her head. To the movie’s credit, it often shows her quietly assessing the situation and figuring out (sometimes quite bleakly) when she has to simply go along with men who could harm her in some way. But Kendrick has such a present-day energy that it often feels like she’s thinking, “plus, it’s the ’70s” when considering her immediate safety (not least because she gets to retain her very millennial mannerisms in the Dating Game scenes especially). Similarly, when Laura (Nicolette Robinson) tries and fails to get a police officer to pay attention to her spotting of her friend’s possible murderer in a Dating Game episode, she winds up screaming “DO YOUR JOB!” in a moment that feels more like a furious tweet than an organic expression of her (very real and justifiable) anger.
Woman of the Hour isn’t the only 2024 movie to funnel misogyny, the ’70s, and a flip game-show culture into a single story, though The Apprentice brings in the latter more obliquely. The film, about Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) and his relationship with mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), is cheekily titled after the TV show that gave Trump his second wind and his unlikely political career, but the movie ends before the NBC show actually airs. The first half or so takes place throughout the ’70s, from 1973 until around 1978, while the second half focuses on the mid-1980s, around the time of Cohn’s 1986 death.
In the 1970s section, Stan is playing a half-formed Trump, still trying to make a name for himself in real estate via his father’s company (and money), initially seeking counsel from Cohn about a discrimination suit his family company faces. Director Ali Abbasi makes an effort to imitate the grittier celluloid textures of films from that era in his portrait of ’70s Manhattan, in a much shabbier state than the city as we know it today. It makes for an interesting contrast with Woman of the Hour, which has one New York sequence but mostly stays closer to the West Coast, where the sunny environment belies the creeping sense of dread. The Apprentice also depends on its audience assuming a modern sensibility; Stan’s performance is most compelling in the ways that it feels, in this earlier section, like rough draft of the confident, venal blowhard he would become. He’s not all that bright or particularly humane, but he’s softer-spoken, less prone to absurd verbal hubris; more of a garden-variety rich, racist tool.
Despite depending on this familiarity, the movie doesn’t fully succumb to obviousness until it reaches the 1980s. At this point, Stan must perform a more standard imitation of the former president, with accumulating callbacks to what he learned from Cohn and call-forwards to tenets of Trump’s political rampage: the tell-all book about “deals” that says nothing in particular, the choice words and phrases that recur in his stump speeches, even nascent MAGA sloganeering. The movie simply runs out of things to say about this proudly shallow man, especially things that don’t depend on a 2024 vantage point.
That’s what both The Apprentice and Woman of the Hour seek to do, of course: look at how certain sociopolitical truths are not native to this particular moment, connecting the sins of the past with what becomes permissible in our present, aided and abetted by the medium of television (directly in one, looming in the future of another). Yet there’s something prefabricated about their narratives – something that makes both movies feel more like re-enactments than they should, given the high quality of the filmmaking, holding the characters at a remove.
Maybe this is as close as Abbasi could stand to get to Trump, and fair enough; fair, too, that Kendrick wanted a central rooting interest in her movie about rampant misogyny, even if it meant making Cheryl a little pluckier and more resourceful than the passive figure she might have been. It’s even arguable that Kendrick draws viewers in with her rom-com-ready charm, and that Abbasi uses Trump salaciousness to make him look even more pathetic. Explaining the horrors men got away with for so long, though, isn’t ultimately much of a story, and the movies ultimately expend a lot of energy to merely dip a few toes into the eras they want to sink into, leaving them like all red-marker circle and no center. Woman of the Hour and The Apprentice can’t stop reminding you that you’re looking at the past, without realizing they’ve run out of things to say about the present.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.