“Which one of you will hurt me?”: Existential feelings, affective injustice, and interpreting men’s violence in Woman of the Hour

Woman of the Hour (Anna Kendrick, 2024) represents the emotions of an untenable yet common experience: having to interpret which men will be violent. Its key question concerns how women learn to navigate a world in which male violence is provided political and cultural means to conceal itself. As a piece of true crime meta-media, or a film about television production, Woman of the Hour also magnifies a continuum between violent attitudes extended through apparently benign media formats, and the violence experienced by women every day. This article considers cinema’s unique resources for representing existential feelings that arise when interpreting potentials for violence, and how those feelings come to constitute an affective injustice that sustains men’s privilege. I reveal how the film promotes reflection on two politics of visibility that can be in tension in screen violence: the potential to render violence visible in audiovisual means so that perpetration is made clear, comprehensible, and possible to intervene, and the potential to show how misogynist cultures make the consequences of violence unclear, placing the onus of interpretation and emotional management on those who live with the ever-present threat of violence.