If you’ve ever encountered those “normal looking photos with a scary backstory” posts on social media or are interested in odd true crime stories, chances are good you’re familiar with the plot of Woman of the Hour. In broad strokes, Cheryl Bradshaw (Anna Kendrick, also in the director’s chair) is a down-on-her-luck actor. To pay the rent, she takes a gig on one of those 70s “One Single, Three Suitors” dating shows. Among her three options, Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) distinguishes himself as neither a self-entitled horndog nor a too-anxious-to-function empty suit. Rodney is also, it turns out, a prolific serial killer. It sounds like the setup for a suitably sorted erotic thriller. Perhaps, in other hands, it would be just that.

However, Kendrick’s direction and Ian McDonald’s script center Alcala’s targets, not the “isn’t this wild?” aspect. In their hands, Woman of the Hour becomes commentary on the dangers these women (and too many others) faced, fought, and sadly, sometimes succumbed to. While firmly centered in the late 70s, it doesn’t take much of a squint to find the antecedents of modern issues of sexism, control, and gendered violence.

The best section unfolds during the latter half of Bradshaw’s dating game appearance. Inspired by a makeup artist, she ditches the questions prepared for her by the show’s producers and ignores “benign” sexist host Ed Burke’s (Tony Hale, playing Jim Lange in all but name) passive-aggressive attempts to pull her back on message. Instead, she begins to pepper the guests with queries that quickly expose their misogyny and lack of intelligence. Only Alcala rises to the occasion, using his engrained sociopathy to present as the kind of “modern” man Bradshaw wants.

Kendrick comes to life in the moment, fully embracing the spotlight and the power it temporarily provides her. She’s good throughout but excels here. She’s fast, witty, and eviscerating. However, she wisely never lets the film fall so in love with her that we lose track of what’s unfolding. While Alcala is the monster, the other prospects aren’t great. Bachelor #1 (Matt Visser) is a handsome idiot. He’s the kind who will get hired and promoted ahead of her despite not having a 10th of her brain power or charisma. Bachelor #2 (Jedidiah Goodacre) is a frat boy type who demands big breasts but is willing to let an a-cup blow him occasionally. Presumably out of goodwill. He might be performing for “the boys,” but he’s still delighting in saying it about a woman he hasn’t even seen yet. We all remember “locker room talk,” don’t we?

The script takes great pains to show that even when women do nearly everything right, they can still end up in danger or worse. The biggest example is a parking lot sequence where Bradshaw properly clocks Alcala as a threat—if not precisely how big a one. She attempts to evade him. She’s smart, strong, and doesn’t panic. And it still nearly doesn’t matter. Other moments dot the rest of the film. Women fighting back, women running, women trying to tell someone, be it a cop, a television producer, or a boyfriend. Each time, it isn’t enough. Only Amy (Autumn Best, playing a character based on survivor Monique Hoyt), escapes the killer’s worst. Still, it doesn’t happen before she endures considerable emotional and physical trauma. It isn’t hard to see the echoes in today, where institutions coach women on how to walk, how to party, and so on for safety.

Kendrick doesn’t just put it on the other performers, either. When not in control at the dating show, Bradshaw doesn’t object when casting directors meet her refusal to do nudity with a gesture at her breasts and a reassurance that “I’m sure they’re good.” She sleeps with a friend, Terry (Pete Holmes, a suitable mix of supportive, noxious, and pathetic), when he becomes upset after she rejects his initial advances. Better to have an unpleasant sexual encounter with someone you aren’t attracted to than risk his wrath.

The feature is an intelligent retort to all the “isn’t he handsome” fawning audiences endured at the hands of several Ted Bundy-related projects over the past five years. Zovatto nails how sociopaths can, yes, be charming, but their charisma is of the shallow, brittle kind. Spend time with one, and they quickly lose their luster. Their supposed brilliance is also more act than reality, the result of assembling a handful of quick replies for frequent and a willingness to fabricate nonstop.

Woman of the Hour’s relationship to violence furthers the sense of the impossibility of stopping it. Kendrick and cinematographer Zach Kuperstein find a way to portray it respectfully without shying away from its horror. Captured either from a distance, half witnessed through a skylight, or in bleary fragments as if waking from a concussion, the shots manage to place the viewer in the position of being both alongside the victim and a distant witness. It isn’t exploitative or voyeuristic, though. Instead, it mimics the sense of helplessness someone like Laura (Nicolette Robinson) must have felt when she reported Alcala to the police not once but twice for her friend’s murder and still saw no action. The camera gets us close enough to the violence to “feel” it while keeping us too far away to do anything about it.

At times, the story’s structure can inhibit some of the storytelling momentum. Woman of the Hour tends to intersperse moments from encounters between Alcala and women with scenes in the film’s present. When it works, as with the Amy scenes, it ratchets up the tension. The technique gives an underlying sense of unease to otherwise innocuous scenes that follow. When it doesn’t, though, it strays from the flashbacks for too long, sapping them of immediacy. It is informative that the most effective flashback, the one that opens the film, is also its most intact. Letting it play out gives Kelley Jakle real space to make a what could’ve been a throwaway character in Sarah a fully realized. As a result, the audience never shakes her. Her ghost haunts the rest of the film.

Nonetheless, Woman of the Hour does something many movies can’t manage. It sticks with you. The more it lingers, the more the ways it speaks to the sexism and violence of that time bubble up. The more it becomes hard not to see how they still stalk today, often in not significantly different forms.

Woman of the Hour stream on Netflix starting October 18.

Woman of the Hour Trailer: