'Primetime' review: Thrilling drama exposes the ugly spectacle of 'To Catch a Predator'
Courtesy of A24
“Why don’t you take a seat over there?”
Those words became synonymous with “To Catch a Predator,” the popular “Dateline NBC” series hosted by journalist Chris Hansen from 2004 to 2007. Hansen would calmly deliver the line to men who had arrived at a suburban home expecting to meet a minor for sex, unaware that their online conversations had been part of an elaborate sting operation. Even if you never regularly watched the show, you almost certainly knew its setup. It became appointment television built around the unsettling thrill of watching alleged predators realize, in real time, that their private conversations were about to destroy their public lives.
The men were accused of attempting truly heinous acts, which made it easy for viewers to justify the satisfaction they took in watching them squirm. Yet the show’s appeal was never limited to public safety or investigative journalism. It was also humiliation packaged as entertainment, complete with dramatic entrances, hidden cameras and Hansen coolly reading explicit chat transcripts back to his increasingly panicked subjects. Viewers could enjoy the spectacle while telling themselves that watching was a moral act.
Following last year’s harrowing documentary “Predators,” which examined the troubling methods and cultural legacy of the series, Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” approaches the same material as a reality television thriller. Robert Pattinson plays a feverishly heightened version of Hansen, a journalist who believes he is doing the Lord’s work by protecting children but is equally aware that moral outrage can produce extraordinary ratings.
The mechanics of the show were straightforward, even if the ethical boundaries surrounding them were not. Members of the online watchdog group Perverted Justice entered chat rooms while posing as minors, waiting for adult men to initiate contact and preserving the conversations that followed. Once those exchanges became sexual, the men were invited to a house outfitted with hidden cameras. A young-looking decoy would briefly greet them before disappearing, at which point Hansen emerged from behind a curtain, introduced himself and began reading their own messages back to them. After the confrontation, the men were typically met outside by law enforcement.
“Primetime” recreates that process through producer Andie Bender, played with fierce, frightening resolve by Merritt Wever, and decoy performers Dan and Del, played by Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers. Together, they help transform an investigative segment into a carefully calibrated television machine. Every supposedly spontaneous encounter is rehearsed, photographed and shaped for maximum dramatic effect. The operation may be organized around catching dangerous men, but its continued existence depends upon giving viewers a satisfying episode every week.
Pattinson captures Hansen’s unmistakable cadence while pushing his genial television persona into something more feverish and unsettling. The actor, continuing a banner year after “The Drama” and “The Odyssey,” gets under your skin as a determined, increasingly scuzzy host who understands exactly how ratings work. He knows that competing against J.J. Abrams’ “Lost” on Wednesday nights means he must continually deliver something bigger, darker and more sensational, even as his marriage to a briefly seen Anna Faris begins falling apart.
Regardless of one’s opinion about the purpose, ethics or legality of “To Catch a Predator,” its effectiveness as television cannot be denied. “Primetime” understands that uncomfortable contradiction. The show allowed audiences to witness something horrifying from a safe distance, then rewarded them with the certainty that the person on the other side of the screen deserved whatever happened next. That certainty gradually became the film’s real subject because Hansen’s appetite for bigger confrontations could only grow as long as millions of people continued watching.
The audience’s complicity remains at the forefront of “Primetime,” although the film does not investigate the legal fallout of the series as thoroughly as “Predators.” Its interests are less procedural than psychological. Oppenheim wants to understand what happens when journalism, law enforcement and reality television become so entangled that nobody can determine where public service ends and performance begins.
That tension culminates in the Texas operation involving assistant district attorney Bill Conradt (played by Alex Winter). Unlike the other targets, Conradt does not arrive at the decoy house, forcing Hansen and the authorities to decide whether the story is important enough to pursue directly to his home. The film presents him as Hansen’s “white whale,” a potentially powerful government figure whose exposure could elevate the series beyond another ratings hit. When Conradt dies by suicide as authorities close in, the incident reveals the danger of an operation in which the demands of television have begun shaping the pursuit of justice itself.
Oppenheim brilliantly captures the texture of the era through a grungy, handmade visual aesthetic. Using the same kind of digital video cameras associated with the original program before transferring the footage to 16mm, he creates images that appear to deteriorate the longer we stare at them. Hidden-camera angles and lingering close-ups leave Pattinson’s face looking glossy, distorted and increasingly sinister. “Primetime” does not simply recreate mis-2000s through costumes, hairstyles and technology. It recreates the grimy sensation of watching private shame converted into public entertainment.
Luke Dittrich and Ajon Singh’s screenplay paints Hansen as a deeply conflicted figure, although Pattinson never plays that conflict predictably. The mild, reassuring facade associated with Hansen is gradually overtaken by an amped-up version who treats every confrontation as both a moral crusade and a performance. When someone asks about his delivery, he insists, “I’m never acting,” despite the film beginning with him rehearsing the very lines he will later repeat for the cameras. His first appearance on set practically becomes a theatrical entrance, complete with Hansen pulling back the curtain as though announcing that the star has arrived.
Pattinson relishes that contradiction. His Hansen needs to believe in the righteousness of the work because acknowledging his own ambition would destabilize the entire enterprise. He may genuinely want to protect children, but he also enjoys the recognition, the authority and the power of making another person collapse with a few carefully delivered questions. Pattinson makes him manic, charismatic and frequently repellent, a man who has become so skilled at performing sincerity that he may no longer recognize when the performance ends.
Bridgers and Gisondo bring a layer of early innocence that the film is determined to crush. Gisondo plays an aspiring actor who sees the show as a possible route to his SAG card and a career-making opportunity. At first, the job appears relatively harmless: stand in the kitchen, deliver a few lines and leave before the confrontation begins. As the stings become more elaborate, however, he is pulled further into Hansen’s orbit and begins imitating the host’s swagger, eager to prove that he is more than the cute face used to lure men inside.
Del, played by Bridgers in her first major film role, is more attuned to the emotional contamination of the work. She and Dan are technically performers, but they are also being asked to inhabit the darkest roles imaginable while surrounded by adults who insist that the mission justifies everything. Their experiences allow “Primetime” to question who else becomes collateral damage when trauma is treated as raw material for television. The men walking into the house may be the intended targets, but the people waiting inside are not protected from what the production demands of them.
“Primetime” does not always gel narratively. It operates as a thriller with a strong current of arthouse horror, an approach that makes sense given Ari Aster’s involvement as a producer but occasionally leaves the film caught between character study, media satire and institutional indictment. Oppenheim has created something purposefully disorienting, although that fragmentation sometimes prevents the movie from examining its most provocative ideas as deeply as it could.
The film also introduces Hansen with Pattinson already operating at maximum intensity. He begins at an 11, leaving the performance with little room to build as the production becomes more ethically compromised. A quieter opening might have allowed us to watch ambition gradually consume whatever journalistic restraint Hansen once possessed. Instead, the film presents him as fully formed, almost as though the television monster already existed before the audience gave him a reason to emerge.
Then again, “Primetime” is less interested in presenting a measured account of what happened than in exposing the diseased underbelly of reality television. Oppenheim throws the spectacle back in our faces and asks us to confront the version of Hansen that viewers helped create. The show needed predators, but it also needed escalating confrontations, bigger revelations and a host willing to keep pushing after the cameras should have stopped.
That is the grim bargain at the center of “Primetime.” Television can disguise voyeurism as public service only for so long before ratings become the mission and justice becomes part of the set dressing. Oppenheim may not completely reconcile the film’s competing impulses, but he leaves us with a queasy understanding of what happens when the pursuit of accountability becomes inseparable from the demand to put on a good show. Hansen may insist that he is never acting, but “Primetime” suggests that once the cameras started rolling, everyone was playing a role, including those of us watching from home.
Grade: B
PRIMETIME opens in theaters Friday, September 25.
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