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“Can you get tighter in on him?” Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) demands of the technician editing his latest “To Catch a Predator” segment. He has noticed that when his would-be pedophile prey finally spot him, stepping
out of an upstairs bedroom or strolling through the kitchen door of the house designed to ensnare evildoers like them, their nostrils tend to flare. Hansen wants that quiver to read onscreen. He thinks people will like to see it. Perhaps in the very same spirit of ghoulish voyeurism, director Lance Oppenheim has designed “Primetime” as a nightmarishly claustrophobic 4:3 portrait of Hansen as a horror villain, macro-zoomed-in as if, past the point of image degradation, approaching the point at which the portrait becomes all but unrecognisable as a human being, we might be able to peer through the sickly sheen of his skin, dive in through one of his pores and see his very soul. Or the place where his soul once, presumably, lived.
In DP David Bolen’s greasy, saturated images, so livid with grain that it feels like they leave dirt under your fingernails, the film begins in 2006 when then-NBC head Jeff Zucker (played, in quite the coup, by Jeff Zucker) calls Hansen and his producer Andie (Merritt Wever) into a meeting. In response to public demand, and rather against Zucker’s own stated preferences, their show, previously a part of NBC’s “Dateline,” is being moved to its own primetime slot, where it will slug it out for ratings against ABC’s juggernaut “Lost.”
In an interesting incidental parallel with the newspaper rivalry outlined in Danny Boyle’s Venice opener “Ink” — another portrait of a media man driven beyond the bounds of morality, with similarly fatal consequences — the desire to surpass “Lost’s” viewership numbers becomes an obsession for Hansen, even though he has distractions aplenty. His relationship with his wife (Anna Faris) and kids is disintegrating and a National Enquirer journo keeps threatening to run an exposé of his infidelities. Meanwhile Andie is being headhunted by a rival show on another network, and newly recruited “decoy” Dan (Skyler Gisondo) is trying hard to square his naive dreams of acting stardom with his role as the show’s resident underage bait. Then Hansen hears that, in Texas, a potential “whale” (ie. a person of political importance) has maybe taken that bait, and he makes a series of increasingly rash decisions to pursue the man at all costs.
Daniel Garber’s inspired, allusive and often very witty editing style constantly makes illuminating connections and interruptions. But otherwise, this uncompromisingly grimy approach would be actively repellent were it not for the extraordinary performances, which make “Primetime” a thing you cannot stop watching even as the desire to flee to the nearest shower cubicle grows.
Most obviously, front and center, and in endlessly intrusive close-up, there’s Pattinson — who also serves as producer — playing the arrogant, fame-addicted, megalomaniac Hansen. Pattinson’s mimicry of the real Hansen’s physical mannerisms, like the awkward staging of his gotcha moments while he clutches a sheaf of damning chatroom printouts, is one thing. But his vocal impersonation, capturing the self-consciously over-rehearsed cadences of Hansen’s speech, is uncanny. The film’s excellent soundscape, powered by Ari Balouzian’s throbbing, queasy score, often features snatches of Hansen trying out different deliveries of deeply ick messages from the groomer-of-the-moment. “I will undress you; you will undress me,” he murmurs repeatedly over black as the opening titles end.
But Pattinson’s is only one turn within a stellar cast who individually deliver some career-best screen work. In particular Wever, who has never not been good in anything, is absolutely blistering here, as Hansen’s undervalued, gum-snapping, shark-eyed producer — perhaps less of a sociopath than Hansen only because she has less influence. And who is worse, anyway: the madman who practically cannot stop himself marching further towards the gates of hell, or the perfectly sane pragmatist who elects, in full possession of her faculties, to ride on his coattails all the way there?
Beyond Wever, there are revelatory turns from a very moving Gisondo, and from singer Phoebe Bridgers, whose character, Del, regards her decoy position as “a form of activism” against child abusers. Bridgers proffers the second of the film’s most impressive transformations when Del is occasionally pressed into service to perform as an underage boy — changing her body language, her gait and, again, her voice. But there are really no weak links in the chain of performances here, from Tony Revolori, Jonathan Lipnicki and Alex Winter (superb) in the unenviable roles of the quote-unquote predators, to Matthew Maher as the wildly overzealous researcher with the Perverted Justice group, without whose expertise in luring pedophiles out from behind their computer screens, the “To Catch a Predator” phenomenon never could have happened.
So how did it all happen? That’s a question that “Primetime” doesn’t really care to answer — and one better addressed in David Osit’s excellent 2025 documentary “Predators.” With its narrow focus on Hansen’s progressive psychological disintegration, there is little room outside “Primetime’s”‘ cramped, feverish frames for anything like context, and its only real attempt is perhaps the film’s only misstep. We’re asked to believe that Hansen developed a child-snatching-monster mythology during a trip to India in the ’90s, which gives the film its most overt genre-horror imagery but also implies he has an actual system of belief — a code of honor, however skewed — when elsewhere, he is more convincingly characterized as a void, wrapped in an ego so overweeningly ambitious that his only belief is in himself.
It’s amusing to consider that Pattinson is also the star of “The Batman,” when the Hansen of “Primetime” can be read as a self-styled Dark Knight of vigilante justice, suffering from a kind of White Knight syndrome, by which he mistakes the adulation of the TV-watching public for actual moral rectitude. (Yet he is still petty enough to phone the helpline number on the vending machine that has failed to dispense his snack. Who does that? Of all the many seedy little features of Hansen’s interior landscape, that may just be the most disturbing, as well as the funniest.) “There used to be a pillory in every civilized town,” Hansen tells Dan, while the lighting illuminates his white teeth and makes empty black holes of his eyes, “but now there’s a TV in every home.” “Primetime” does a unsettlingly effective job of explaining how that kind of ubiquity can drive a man to the brink of insanity. But it never swings its ravenous camera back on us; perhaps Oppenheim knows we’re not ready for what it would reveal.
