Robert Pattinson in Primetime

Documentarian Lance Oppenheim makes the leap to narrative feature film with Primetime, a psychological thriller/horror movie about Chris Hansen and the 2000s TV show, To Catch a Predator (Primetime is adapted by Ajon Singh from Luke Dittrich’s book, Tonight on ‘Dateline’ This Man Will Die). Primetime is a cockroach movie, the kind of sleazily cinematic film that crawls across your skin and leaves you wishing desperately for a shower. As a documentarian, Oppenheim focuses on niche communities their special interests; here he widens his lens to take on one of the most broadly repugnant forces in society: child exploitation. Matching Oppenheim on the sicko scale is Robert Pattinson, who stars as Chris Hansen.

Pattinson is, simply put, astonishing in Primetime. His performance is completely unhinged, he has never seen a hinge, he has never even heard of the concept of “hinged”. Every decision is surprising and amazing, at one point he violently spits mouthwash into a sink, and yes, that is exactly what should happen in that moment. Pattinson has always bent his characters in the direction of weird but in Primetime his performance feels like he is operating without a map, that he blew past “weird” five stops ago and is barreling toward some new conceptual plane of existence where discomfort is the only emotion. At no point does “Chris Hansen” seem comfortable in his own skin. He seems five seconds away from peeling off his skin and howling.

Primetime is tightly focused on Chris and To Catch a Predator’s rapid rise to the top of the television rating charts in the mid-2000s, and its equally swift fall. It’s so tightly focused, in fact, that it feels like the whole thing happens in about two months, tops, but that momentum also gives the film a dimension of inevitability, as if there is no other way this story could ever end. The film touches on Chris’s rivalry with Dateline anchor Stone Phillips (Bill Heck) and his crumbling marriage to Mary (Anna Faris, committed but underserved), but the film is primarily focused on Chris’s two-pronged quest to both push Predator to the top of the Nielsen chart and eliminate all evil from the world.

But Chris can’t make a whole TV show alone. Producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) is the one making the machine run, and she does so with an appropriately bankrupt moral code. Even when Andie knows they’re crossing lines and feels the wheels coming off, she ultimately can’t break out of the cycle of toxicity because the lure of creating “good television” is simply too strong. And then there are the “decoys”. Del (Phoebe Bridgers), who plays both teen boys and girls to lure the titular predators into the show’s trap; and Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo, in a career-best turn), a hopeful actor seeking his big break, who is assaulted within seconds of walking onto the Predator set.

Oppenheim structures Primetime as a series of overlapping loops that are meant to show how pervasive moral rot is in American society. Chris’s crusade to end child predation is, on its face, noble, but he skirts the law and pushes judicial boundaries, mostly relying on the court of public opinion to destroy lives rather than ensure criminals are actually brought to justice. And all while To Catch a Predator is streaking up the ratings’ charts, Jared Fogle, a now-convicted sex offender with charges against minors, is the superstar face of Subway and America’s favorite formerly fat person.

Then there are the cops who enthusiastically embrace Chris and Predator, including Cortland Gunn (Bokeem Woodbine), a small-town Texas sheriff who only agrees to bring the show to town as a publicity stunt during his re-election campaign. He greets Chris and his crew with a full display of armored vehicles and automatic weapons, an insanely over-resourced police force, where the cops are ginned up on War on Terror money and steroidal patriotism. The thing that unites all these people is a desire to protect children—which seems more about embiggening their own sense of self rather than actually helping kids—but there is no escaping that at the same time, Jared Fogle is using his fame and access to schoolchildren to commit the very crimes Chris is so concerned about. But that’s not good TV.  

Other loops that Oppenheim lays down are between character and casting, as he casts a series of former child stars including Tony Revolori, Jonathan Lipnicki, and Alex Winter as predators featured on the show, connecting the exploitation of Hollywood to that of Predator to the real exploitation of actual kids. Skyler Gisondo, another former child star, provides another loop as his character, Dan, is subjected to the kind of on-set harassment real child actors too often suffer. Oppenheim does a good job showing how exploitation runs in many directions at once, it is not, as Chris believes, a singular entity that can be combated in one-on-one confrontations.

Exploitation is a hydra, not the creepy masked figure Chris imagines in his feverish delusions. He is convinced there is a “great evil” in the world, but his imagination is too limited. It is not one definable villain, it’s a web of access and power that ensnares everyone, across all boundaries of gender, class, race, ethnicity, continent, time. Chris is tangled in that web, too, exploiting the predators as much as anyone else, using the complete destruction of their lives for his own personal gain. Primetime doesn’t offer sympathy for these men, but it does show how inescapable and encompassing the web truly is.

Though there is, perhaps, a tinge of something almost like sympathy for the final predator, Bill Conradt (Alex Winter). He’s a district attorney in Texas and he represents the kind of “whale” the show is chasing in the name of ratings. He’s part of the system meant to punish predators, after all, while he himself is one. At first, he is just an elusive presence on the internet, though, and through those interactions we first see Conradt as someone who obviously knows what he is doing is wrong, who is trying to stop himself, but ultimately, he cannot. Conradt then dies by suicide during a raid at his house, all while the Predator crew is filming. It’s a tragedy, and that embodiment of evil Chris keeps seeing pops up again, as Chris is confronted with his own place within the web, the ways in which he, too, is a predator.

Primetime is a bold and unforgettable narrative debut for Lance Oppenheim (though I am compelled to mention that the sound mix is terrible), and it is certainly a humdinger of a performance from Robert Pattinson. The loops and layers of exploitation and predation are a nightmare built by a society rotted by the pursuit of bigger, better, best. When everything is ratings, when everything is competition, there is no facet of life or person who cannot and will not be exploited for someone else’s gain. There are no heroes in Primetime, there are only cockroaches slithering in the dreck, battling for dominance in the sh-t heap.

Primetime is now playing exclusively in theaters.