Primetime

by Hope Madden

In 2021, Lance Oppenheim directed the wild documentary Some Kind of Heaven about Florida’s exclusive retirement community, The Villages. Beneath the blinding aqua pools, savage tans and vacant smiles, a seediness rotted away.

The director dials that tone up a notch for Primetime, the based-on-real-events feature that chronicles the rise and fall of a TV phenomenon.

 Robert Pattinson is Chris Hansen, host of NBC’s To Catch a Predator. Often, when an actor portrays a reprehensible character, the strength of the performance comes from finding the humanity at the center of the monster. And yet, Pattinson—among the most fascinating actors of a generation—chooses to do the opposite. His turn is just this side of farcical, beautifully so. Pattinson offers Hansen exactly the empathy Hansen himself possessed, and the character is so compellingly repugnant you cannot look away.

Hansen’s frantic ambition leads an already unseemly production to new lows in search of ratings. His emotional regulator and quiet puppeteer, producer Andie Bender, is played with magnificent nuance by Merritt Wever. Like the character, Wever quietly controls the film.

And for the human heartbeat, Skyler Gisondo, in a rare dramatic role, offers a tenderness that amplifies the ugliness, the garishness, of not only the true story itself but Oppenheim’s film.

To Catch a Predator was insanely popular, viewers tuning in to watch a would-be sexual predator lured into committing to a terrible decision. It brought out the ugliness in viewers, and Oppenheim’s film delivers its take on the predatory nature of the show and of the entertainment industry with the same salacious verve.

Daniel Garber’s editing mimics and mocks true crime sensationalism, almost hypnotizing you with seediness and a strange comic sensibility. That hint of humor—in Pattinson’s performance, in the way he’s lit and made up, in the editing—is what makes the film such a grotesque success.