The characters in Primetime often look directly into the camera and out at the audience — to confide in us, to implicate us, and to interrogate us. This is a cold-blooded media satire that often teeters into cerebral horror, a movie that wants to lock eyes with you and pin you to your seat while you squirm.
It’s about the production of To Catch a Predator, a segment that ran on Dateline NBC in the early 2000s. You probably know the format. Men who have been chatting online with teenagers agree to meet up for sex. What they don’t know is it’s all a setup, and they’re confronted by host Chris Hansen, a stiff news-anchor type who would dryly ask them what the hell they were doing.
As Primetime begins, the show has become a sensation. But Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson, is already concerned it’s a one-trick pony. The film, directed by Lance Oppenheim and written by Ajon Singh, follows Hansen down a rabbit hole of obsession and opportunism, and we go right along with him thanks to a trio of strong performances: Not only Pattinson, but Merritt Weaver as Hansen’s ratings-obsessed, gum-chomping producer, and Skyler Gisondo as Dan, an aspiring actor who’s cast as one of the show’s young decoys.
Dan emerges as Primetime’s stealth protagonist, and his naivete is chipped away as he’s put in harm’s way while the producers get a sick thrill from the hunt. To Catch a Predator put faces to something truly contemptible, but the movie convincingly argues that in its mission to expose real-world abuse, it exploited the people behind the scenes.
Gisondo and Weaver settle confidently into their roles, while Pattinson is acting with every muscle in his body. He’s become one of those live-wire performers who startles you with his choices; here, he’s like a robot trying to approximate normal human movement. As Hansen, Pattinson drains his eyes of emotion — they’re steely but vacant — and his mouth forms words before he says them. He becomes sweatier and more manic, and the movie does, too.
Oppenheim is a documentarian making his narrative debut, and he employs a maelstrom of visuals that are in stark contrast to the flat style of reality TV. The colors are oversaturated. The musical score drowns out the dialogue. The close-ups are a bit too tight. There’s a trip through internet cables that resembles the Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It has a bludgeoning effect, and its busyness betrays the movie’s rather simpleminded consideration of its own themes. This is a relatively empty movie about a thorny, tawdry, complicated subject. But it’s nonetheless oddly captivating, and its greatest irony is that it has the stomach-churning allure of a trashy reality show.
There’s dimension to the performances but not the characters, but only people with the depth and moral clarity of a mud puddle could throw themselves into this line of work. Primetime is as subtle as the show it’s about. Maybe it’s meant to be.