Not every actress can be a AAA star, after all Hollywood is very picky about giving actresses lead roles as it is, and it certainly wouldn’t want to give them ideas above their station in thinking they were in anyway equal to their male counterparts.

One of the most watchable of the current generation of actresses has to be Anna Kendrick; the US actress made an impression in the Twilight franchise, playing Jessica Stanley, friend to the main protagonist. She made a real impression however in Jason Reitman’s 2009 Up in the Air, opposite George Clooney.

Since then she’s the type of actress who you can rely on to make whatever she’s in, that much better. She does the same with this her latest project, which she also had the temerity to mark her directorial debut with.

Everyone knows that if you want to be an actor you have to go to Los Angeles. But just because you live there, doesn’t guarantee diddly as aspiring actress Sheryl (Kendrick) discovers. She’s already struggling with the endless auditions and the rejections that come with them.

But just as she’s about to tell her agent she’s quitting, she tells her she has a gig for her, on TV. It’s the perfect role for her she says, playing herself, but it’s not quite what Sheryl was hoping for. What her agent has for her is a spot as a contestant on the popular show The Dating Game; after all if, it was good enough for Sally Field who appeared on the show, it was good enough for her. Acknowledging the reasoning behind that, and appreciating that it’s a popular show, Cheryl agrees.

Little does she know – or anyone else for that matter - that one of her three contestants she has to choose from, is actually a serial killer.

It’s certainly a bold choice to make for your first directing gig, but Kendrick puts on an impressive show. She’s certainly helped by the fact that it is, somewhat remarkably, based on fact, with Rodney Alcala – played with just the right level of menace by Daniel Zovatto – appearing on the popular game show during his fairly substantial murder spree.

Kendrick the actress is as ever, always watchable, playing the wannabe actress to perfection. But it’s perhaps what she does behind the camera that’s more impressive.

The director plays around with the timeline in an intriguing fashion, interjecting a number of flashbacks into the main character’s Cheryl’s timeline leading up to and including her appearance on the show. These flashbacks are used to illustrate the charming monster she’s about to confront on national TV, as the audience is privy to his heinous crimes.

The result is a gripping, taut drama, pleasantly edge-of-your-seat stuff, as we get closer to the film’s gripping finale. It just goes to show that if Kendrick doesn’t feel the need to pursue an acting career - much like her character Sheryl – she shows real potential for this directing malarkey.

The only quibble is that you kind of expect to see the actual footage of the pair meeting on the dating show, usually in a post-credit scene, but sadly it doesn’t appear here, perhaps for legal issues.

Kendrick’s debut then is a confident and striking effort, which certainly makes her a strong candidate for the position stated in her film’s title, and hopefully for a longer period of time than that too.