Review: Primetime

Primetime is the kind of movie that practically dares you to have a clean reaction to it. Lance Oppenheim’s dramatization of Chris Hansen and the rise of To Catch a Predator arrives dressed like a fever dream from the mid-2000s, all blown-out video texture, sour neon, and the clammy atmosphere of television sets pretending to be homes. It is gripping, often queasy, and powered by a lead performance so strange and committed that it becomes the movie’s central argument. The trouble is that the argument itself remains slippery.

Robert Pattinson plays Hansen not as a noble crusader or simple opportunist, but as a man slowly becoming possessed by his own image. His Hansen is polished and hollow, a broadcast-ready shell trying to convince himself there is a righteous man inside it. Pattinson finds the absurdity in the performance without turning it into parody. He understands that Hansen’s authority comes from stillness, from the carefully timed pause, from the way a television personality can make judgment feel like public service. Yet he also lets panic flicker behind the eyes. This is a man who knows, on some level, that the camera is not merely documenting his work. It is feeding him.

The supporting performances are just as sharp. Merritt Wever brings a brittle intelligence to Andie Bender, the producer trying to hold together a machine that grows more grotesque the more successful it becomes. Skyler Gisondo is terrific as Dan Plum, whose eagerness curdles into discomfort once he realizes what this job actually requires of him. Phoebe Bridgers and Matthew Maher give the Perverted Justice side of the operation an odd, unsettling texture: part activist collective, part surveillance cult, part underfunded theater troupe staging moral catastrophe for network television.

Visually, Primetime is striking from its first moments. Oppenheim and cinematographer David Bolen make the film look like it has been recorded over too many times, as if the image itself has absorbed the grime of the enterprise. Faces loom too close. Rooms feel too hot. The color palette has the sickly glow of old televisions left on in dark motel rooms. It is not realism exactly, but something closer to memory, or maybe contamination. The movie understands that To Catch a Predator belonged to a specific era of American media, when fear, punishment, humiliation, and entertainment all learned to speak the same language.

That is where Primetime is at its most compelling. The film is less interested in whether the men caught in these stings deserve sympathy, and more interested in what happens when justice becomes content. The caught men are predatory, pathetic, and dangerous. The show that exposes them is also manipulative, self-aggrandizing, and addicted to escalation. Oppenheim seems fascinated by the way everyone involved can be both right and wrong at the same time. There is value in stopping harm. There is also something deeply ugly about turning that harm into a ratings event.

But the film’s moral murkiness is both its strength and its limitation. Primetime wants to indict the media circus, the audience, Hansen, NBC, vigilante culture, post-9/11 paranoia, and the hunger for televised punishment. That is a lot for one movie to carry, and at times it seems more confident in its mood than in its ideas. The subject is horrifying, but the film occasionally treats horror as an atmosphere rather than a responsibility. Victims hover at the edge of the story, invoked more than considered. The result is that the movie can feel trapped inside the very spectacle it means to critique.

Still, there is real power in that discomfort. Primetime never lets us sit easily with the fantasy that exposure equals justice or that entertainment can be morally purified by having the right target. Its best scenes are not the confrontations themselves, but the moments before and after: Hansen rehearsing, producers bargaining, camera operators preparing, everyone waiting for the doorbell to ring. The operation starts to look less like journalism than ritual.

As a film, Primetime is uneven but difficult to shake. It features some of the year’s strongest performances and a visual style that gives the whole thing the texture of a corrupted broadcast signal. I only wish the movie had looked a little harder at the human cost beyond Hansen’s unraveling. It knows the machine is rotten. It knows we helped build it. What it cannot quite decide is whether showing us the machine again is an act of criticism, fascination, or both.

3.5/5