“Which one will hurt me?”

In Woman of the Hour, that’s the question beneath the questions posed by Sheryl, an aspiring actress transplanted to Los Angeles in search of her big break. Thrust somewhat unwillingly onto a stage as the bachelorette seeking her prince charming on The Dating Game, she asks Marilyn the makeup artist if the questions she’s been asking are the correct ones. Marilyn wisely points out that whatever she asks the three men vying for her favor, what she really wants to know is which one of the three is the least dangerous.

It turns out to be the most important question, as one of the bachelors just happens to be a serial killer named Rodney Alcala, played by Daniel Zovatto.

Woman of the Hour is Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, and in it she draws a distinction between the way the camera – and the rest of society – sees a serial killer, versus how his prey sees him. Rodney Alcala really was a serial killer; convicted of the murder of seven women and girls, he’s thought to have killed or assaulted over ten times that many. And he really did appear on The Dating Game, where an aspiring actress named Cheryl Bradshaw selected him, but then declined to go on the “prize” date paid for by the game show because he creeped her out.

Kendrick’s movie uses the taping of this episode of the show as the frame upon which to weave Rodney’s story, but told through the eyes of Sheryl and some of his other victims, all given fictional names though the circumstances of their attacks play out close to how they happened in real life.

As the story of Sheryl’s fateful appearance on the game show plays out, the movie jumps back and forth to show us not just his victims, but the way he preyed on them. Often using his camera as a lure, he lured young women to remote locations, then his friendly, safe façade slowly slips away as he moves in for the kill.

It’s a façade he maintains in front of the camera, where he wows the audience with his thoughtful, even feminist answers. One audience member, a woman named Laura (Nicolette Robinson) is not impressed, however – she slowly realizes to her horror that this is the man who killed her best friend the year before.

Laura’s attempts to convince her boyfriend, a studio security guard, and later the police that she can identify the man who killed her friend are either mocked or ignored. This mirrors the real life response of the police, who detained or arrested Alcala numerous times, subsequently releasing him from custody or on parole, allowing him to kill again.

When a shaken Laura rushes out of the studio audience, she knocks over a monitor, stopping the production of the show temporarily. On her way out of the studio, she attempts to send Sheryl a warning using only her eyes – Sheryl is in danger. It looks like Sheryl is too far away to pick up on the alert, though.

The character of Laura is fictional, but Kendrick uses her demonstrate the ways women sometimes use non-verbal cues to deliver a meaning beneath a message. After the taping ends, Sheryl and Rodney bump into each other outside the studio, and he convinces her to go to a nearby bar to have a drink, also a fictional addition to the story. As their impromptu date grows increasingly uncomfortable, Sheryl uses the same method to signal the waitress that she definitely does not want another drink with this man.

One of the other victims, a teenage runaway named Amy (Autumn Best), who is being driven by Rodney after he brutally beat and raped her, also tries to send a message to the driver of a car stopped at the same intersection, but the driver is a man, and he doesn’t receive the signal.

One very skillful bit of directing and acting comes when Best’s character comes to after her assault, bound hand and foot as Rodney sobs next to her. She asks him to keep their “encounter” a secret. This surprises him, and this very deliberate bit of subterfuge on Amy’s part not only saves her life, but gets her to a safe place where she can call police. Amy’s cool-chick countenance only falters for an instant; we see it but Rodney does not. It’s very well done.

Though Kendrick and writer Ian McDonald had to embellish the game show taping for dramatic effect, the movie is the better for it. And after Sheryl exits Los Angeles, and the film, Rodney’s murder spree continues. But when we see him, it’s always through the POV of a woman, because Sheryl was but one of many women whose lives he affected.

We learn Rodney’s ultimate fate at the end of the film, but just as footnotes, because this movie isn’t called The Dating Game Killer. It’s called Woman of the Hour, and it isn’t just Cheryl Bradshaw’s story, it’s all of the victims’ and survivors’ stories. At it’s heart, it’s ultimately about how women survive in a world made to benefit men (and male predation of women), and it’s a better movie because of that.

Woman of the Hour is now streaming on Netflix.