A24’s new psychological crime thriller “Primetime,” released on September 25, is a garish, unflinching descent into hell, with Robert Pattinson steering the ship straight into the rot.
In “Primetime,” Pattinson’s Chris Hansen takes that gospel to heart. Adapted from Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire exposé, “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die,” the film embellishes some parts of the true-life material rather than playing everything straight.
Director Lance Oppenheim, making his narrative feature debut, utilized a suffocating, boxy aspect ratio and a luridly oversaturated, early-digital color palette, courtesy of cinematographer David Bolen, that perfectly captures the grubby aesthetic of the aughts. It felt grimy just watching it.
“Primetime” begins with a successful “To Catch a Predator” sting in Long Beach, California. Hansen confronts an ex-Marine pedophile, played by Tony Revolori, who thought he was meeting a 13-year-old girl.
“You see how this looks, right?” Hansen says in his signature deadpan, holding damning online chat logs between the Marine and a decoy in hand.
When the man sheepishly asks if he’ll get the electric chair, Hansen replies he has something much more intriguing planned in store: “Do you watch television?” Hansen asks. “I’m Chris Hansen with ‘Dateline NBC,’ and we’re doing a story on adults who try to meet teens online.”
Cameras swarm. Instead of the death penalty, the Marine is sentenced then and there to public humiliation beamed right into the rooms of every American with a TV set.
Oppenheim puts Hansen’s most unhinged and virtuosic, fame-hungry tendencies on full display. Pattinson brilliantly portrays Hansen as a ratings-obsessed ambulance chaser treating criminal stings like opening night on Broadway. Channeling an unholy blend of a sleazy daytime host and a made-for-TV version of Dracula, he seamlessly mimics Hansen’s cadence for the cameras. Then, when the red light is off, he warps into a dark circus ringmaster, a distorted funhouse version.
We see this vanity early on when Hansen obsessively rehearses chat log lines in a mirror, drawing out the juicy salaciousness of “I will undress you,” before confronting his prey. His crusade to catch predators is inextricably linked to his own ballooning ego. It’s no wonder the real-life Hansen recently complained to the press that the film is an “insult,” even publicly wondering if Pattinson’s uncanny, lip-smacking portrayal constitutes “identity theft.”
As Pattinson’s Hansen sees it, he is doing God’s work. “We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” he tells a colleague.
In the biblical Book of Nahum, God pronounces judgment against the sinful city of Nineveh with forceful wrath: “I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.” Hansen has effectively taken that gospel to heart. His predators aren’t caught on camera, they’re made spectacles and freaks to laugh at. Righteous or not? You decide!
Hansen’s mask slips behind closed doors when his true colors are revealed. In one revealing scene, the workaholic reporter returns home, wakes his sleeping children, and marches them into the TV room to watch his lurid broadcasts. “I’m gonna be on primetime,” he gushes. He isn’t just a protector; he’s a star.
But, ever higher stardom demands ever higher ratings, and the clock is ticking. Network boss Jeff Zucker ( played by the real-life Zucker) moves “To Catch a Predator” on a physical schedule board to Wednesdays at 9 p.m. Suddenly, Hansen and crew are thrust into a ratings bloodbath against ABC’s cultural phenomenon, “Lost.”
This initiates the film’s driving force for the second and third act: the hunt for a whale. To compete with the island mysteries and polar bears of “Lost,” Hansen and his scheming producer Andie Bender (played by Merritt Wever) realize that nabbing pedophile outcasts won’t quite cut it anymore. They’re playing in the big leagues now, and they need to catch big-league predators.
“No more bottom feeders,” Hansen demands in a frenzy. “I want a whale.”
They need a blockbuster spectacle, maybe even someone in the upper echelons of government or polite society. Not to mention, Hansen needs a win before his extramarital dalliances are exposed by the National Enquirer. This desperate hunger for a whale ultimately pushes the crew to pivot operations to a town in Murphy, Texas, chasing a local prosecutor. It is here, at the climax, where the consequences of Hansen’s well-meaning pursuit put any lingering sense of self-righteousness under the microscope.
The supporting cast drives the ambitions and justifications driving Hansen’s operation. Merritt Wever’s Bender is excellently portrayed as an even more Machiavellian soul than Hansen, willing to sacrifice her humanity if it means “Predator” jumps in the ratings. Pop star Phoebe Bridgers makes a great acting debut as Del, and she expertly plays the role of a veteran decoy who views her decoy entrapment work as activism against sexual abuse.
Skyler Gisondo’s Dan Plumb, in particular, is the standout in the film. He is a fellow decoy whose sense of naivete, even as a full-grown adult, makes the story tragically intriguing. Especially when compared against Hansen’s seasoned demeanor and laser-focused goal of taking down predators at any cost.
Gisondo conveys the sense of a lamb being led to slaughter as he slowly realizes the toxic rot at the production’s center. The film draws an ugly parallel. Just as predators groom their prey both online and in person, Plumb is being gradually conditioned by Hansen and Bender to sideline his reservations in order to deliver compelling television.
Despite it’s strengths, Primetime, however, is not without its weaknesses. Some connective tissue feels undercooked, and the narrative could be seen as flat and scuzzy, with satiric elements where characters are morally compromised from the very first frame. There is functionally no nuance in the portrayal of Hansen; he experiences no tragic fall from grace because he is already swimming in the gutter.
In that sense, “Primetime” may be guilty of what it condemns. Hansen rigs his stings to maximize entertainment and spectacle, while “Primetime” does the same to Hansen via static caricature. It’s ironic that a film so suspicious of public humiliation via spectacle for entertainment eagerly derives an amount of pleasure from putting Hansen in the hot seat.
Yet despite it all, Oppenheim puts Hansen and his entire operation under the microscope so compellingly that you simply cannot look away. “To Catch A Predator” became a hit not only because of Hansen’s showmanship, but because Americans were so addicted to the public humiliation and schadenfreude of monsters under the pretext of one man’s civic duty. “Primetime” argues that while genuine predators were indeed caught, the relentless and reckless pursuit of predators and the obsession with spectacle fundamentally corrupted the justice being served.
GRADE: A MINUS