Every once in a while, it’s refreshing to go into something knowing nothing at all about it. That isn’t always my approach. I have a friend so deathly afraid of horror films that he has to Google the entire plot synopsis just to make it through one, and I get it: sometimes foreknowledge enhances how we engage with a film. At press screenings, the reps in attendance usually ask for a quote afterward, and I prefer not to be caught flat-footed, so I tend to do a little homework beforehand.
But with Primetime, Lance Oppenheim‘s first narrative feature, I went in very cold. I wasn’t watching much television in the mid-2000s (I was living a bit of a nomadic life back then), so the name Chris Hansen has never meant anything to me, nor has the infamous program he hosted, “To Catch a Predator.” At the screening, my partner even asked me to cover my ears when our fellow critics started discussing the recent documentary Predators. There’s something very silly about treating real-world events everyone else has been plugged into for decades like an MCU movie that can be spoiled, but I’d lasted this long. What was another half-hour?
I’m so glad I did, because this movie, to put it bluntly, rocks, and the thrill of the unknown had a wickedly compounding effect.
On its surface, Oppenheim has made a cool, tense thriller of the kind that rarely fires on all cylinders this consistently (think Nightcrawler). Shaded in a grimy green-and-magenta palette that gives it the texture of 16mm, Primetime splits the story of NBC’s big ratings fiasco three ways. At one corner is Hansen (Robert Pattinson), a once-serious newsman who idolizes then-Dateline anchor Stone Phillips so much that he practically replicates his mannerisms and vocal inflections. Hansen is a tortured guy whose experience saving children in foreign lands has hardened into a singular mission, the one that gave birth to “Predator.” That obsession runs parallel to his hunger for ratings. It’s a collision course you can see coming from kickoff, and Oppenheim lays the pressure on thick.
The other two corners of this triangle are show producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) and young actor Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo). Andie is the glue holding the budding series together, acting as both administrator and nursemaid, at times literally picking her star up off the floor. But she also has one eye on the door, and as her relationship with Hansen erodes, greener pastures beckon ever closer. Dan, meanwhile, is one of the “decoys” the production hires to pose as underage targets. The job is skeevy but simple: get on the phone with these men after they’ve chatted online with the team’s initial “bait” (Matthew Maher), then let them into the house where the cameras are rolling. That’s when Hansen steps out and asks, “What are you doing here?”
Dan is an out-of-work actor in his twenties, and seeing things through the eyes of the person who plays these would-be victims yields especially rich material. One scene that sticks has Dan shaving his chest while a fellow decoy (Phoebe Bridgers) pretends to be a boy on the phone with their latest catch. It’s bookended by Dan getting on the horn with an acting buddy back home (Eric Rahill) and realizing that no matter how deeply he throws himself into the role, his peers will never see the work as legitimate. Dan eventually becomes a kind of moral beacon at the opposite pole from Hansen, and that lets Oppenheim play up the sensationalism of Hansen’s cause while also tugging at its ethical weight. Was “To Catch a Predator” a righteous crusade to protect children, or did it entrap people and exploit their emotional maladies and past traumas? I don’t think Oppenheim is interested in answering that directly, but leaving you with the question is the mark of a film that, at the very least, provokes thought.
It feels almost criminal to breeze past performances as awards-worthy as Wever’s and Gisondo’s, but Primetime lives and breathes on Pattinson, who is in the middle of one of the best runs I’ve seen from an actor in some time. It’s easy to forget how good he was in A24’s The Drama earlier this year, and of course he became this summer’s meme king off one outstanding line reading in The Odyssey. With Primetime, though, he gives arguably one of his greatest performances. I try to ignore the Batman comparisons, but he pulls a similar brooding intensity out of his toolbox here. Each time he walks onto the set just as Dan exits and tells the subject, “Why don’t you have a seat right over there?” it casts a stark pall over everything. Is it too nerdy to say it feels like Batman clomping out of the darkness? Maybe the smarter comparison is that it’s practically vampiric. And yes, Pattinson does the voice, eerily well. It’s an astonishing example of one performer channeling another: a man barely hanging onto what he’s doing and why, who can’t explain it without slipping into a monologue.
More than its considerable surface pleasures, though, I remain struck by Oppenheim’s larger thesis. One need only look at the timing of these events, and their sad aftermath, to understand the argument he’s making about Hansen and “Predator’s” place in history. In 2002, the Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team exposed decades of abuse and cover-up within the Catholic Church. In 2016, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory spread like wildfire through a small but vocal corner of social media. And one need only say “Epstein files” to recall the flashpoint they became, first on the right flank of American politics, and the reap-what-you-sow cudgel they’ve since become. Primetime unfolds over the course of 2006, which raises another question, one Oppenheim answers far more clearly: were Hansen and his show a cultural turning point in and of themselves? Was this the fulcrum that swung the average American viewer from serious investigation of heinous acts and cover-ups into the realm of sensationalism? For Oppenheim, “Predator” was the missing step between the two. It took a generation raised on PSAs asking “Do you know where your children are?” and turned that fear into something tangible that demanded action, whether from politicians or from vigilantes.
The film takes dramatic license, enough that its real-life subject has taken exception to it, but the argument still rings true. Everything can be commodified, even the crimes we can barely bring ourselves to name. This one will haunt you.