With viral internet vigilantes finding inspiration in the punishment spectacle of Dateline NBC’s controversial hidden-camera phenomenon, To Catch a Predator (TCAP), A24’s psychological thriller, Primetime, feels more timely than ever.
The debate around TCAP has never been about whether the on-camera offenders deserve what they’re getting. It’s about who deserves to dole out the punishment and the ethics around the show’s host, Chris Hansen, commercializing his investigations for a mass audience. Primetime dives head-on into the conversation, seriously examining figures like Hansen despite its many creative liberties, but its major tone discrepancies threaten to weaken its overall message.
Set in 2006, Primetime opens with Chris Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson, and his Perverted Justice crew. His relentless producer, Andie Green, is captured through an ice-cold performance by Merritt Wever. His decoys, Dan and Del, are played perfectly by Skyler Gisondo as a young actor in way too deep and Phoebe Bridgers, who is immensely impressive in her acting debut.
Perverted Justice draws would-be pedophiles out to a house rigged with cameras through sexually explicit online messaging. Then, Hansen confronts them with their own words before they come face-to-face with the police.
It’s a formula that captured enough attention to land To Catch a Predator the primetime slot on NBC, in direct competition with Lost. As Hansen becomes obsessed with capturing a mysterious “whale” with ties to the government, his unceasing hunger for television acclaim crashes head-on with reality.
Working from an Ajon Singh script dripping with venom, first-time feature director Lance Oppenheim utilizes his documentary expertise to create a spiralling fever dream imbued with the raw, grimy aesthetics of the era’s TV landscape.
With frenetic pace and a feverish anxiety that seems to emanate from the very heart of the original show, Primetime jumps constantly between Handycam shots, archival montage, and shots of computer and TV screens. Hansen’s ceaseless quest through TV’s underbelly plays out in dank, slimy interiors with blown-out lighting, conveying the characters’ moral rot with an unsettling effect.
Pattinson is perfectly cast as a bizarro version of TCAP’s host, portraying Chris Hansen as a diseased creature ravenously obsessed with his own image, to the point that he becomes disconnected from any semblance of humanity. In typical Pattinson style, he makes bewildering choices with his line deliveries and facial expressions, creating a performance that devours the screen anytime he’s on it.
Pattinson brings a borderline cartoonish intensity to the character that feels more like a gross caricature of Chris Hansen than a true-to-life portrayal. Our inability as an audience to take our eyes off him despite his horrific eccentricities perfectly ties in with the film’s themes of voyeurism and how our hidden appetites for violence are supplied by the media.
From the very first scene, which finds Hansen contorted over a mirror, whispering to himself the grotesque chat logs he’s about to throw back in the face of a would-be child molester, it’s obvious this depiction of Hansen is a man consumed by a drive for television ratings as a means of absolving his own twisted being.
Although he preaches a sacred duty to “rid the world of an ancient evil,” his ethics are muddled by profit and the strange sense of ecstasy he gets from publicly annihilating the show’s despicable subjects.
Primetime walks away with a strong statement, but it’s one that lacks focus. The film varies too much between absurd exaggeration, livewire excitement, and sobering tragedy to deliver a consistently powerful statement without any relevance to the present state of pedophile catching.
Still, Primetime is irresistibly entertaining and captivatingly sinister enough from start to finish to warrant seeing.
Tags
a24, Film Review, Phoebe Bridgers, thriller
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