Primetime starts with a creepy voice reading a chat message to an underage girl and describing, in graphic detail, what he plans to do with her. “It’s going to hurt the first time,” the voice says. “I’ll bring lubricant.”
We think the voice is of a predator, but then the camera focuses on the speaker. It’s To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), his hair neatly combed, dressed in a tan suit, practicing his entrance. He’s a different kind of predator—the reality TV sort. The more lurid the crime, the better.
And right now, he’s in his dressing room, waiting for his call time.
Downstairs, in a staged house, a teenage girl (Phoebe Bridgers)—actually a paid, of-age actress—lets a sheepish looking guy (Tony Revolori) inside. “Your parents aren’t home?” he says, his eyes darting around. She offers him homemade cookies, which he considers, then doesn’t take.
And then Chris Hansen—he always introduces himself as Chris Hansen, never just Chris—pops out and recites the messages he had memorized from the chat. “Have a seat,” he tells the now petrified suspect. It’s one of his famous catchphrases. Then, with a flourish, he delivers the other: “You see how this looks, right?”
In moments the cops are tackling the suspect to the ground, as Hansen and his crew celebrate.
Presiding over all of this is Hansen’s producer, Andie (Merritt Wever), who takes an efficient and unsentimental approach to the work. Her job is to lure and catch sexual predators and then film the moment they are caught. She’s not one to traffic in self-doubt or recrimination. She just gets shit done. And maybe she’s slightly in love with Hansen.
As for Hansen, he’s a narcissist, who loves seeing himself on TV. In one scene, he awakens his sleeping young sons, just so they can see daddy’s segment on television. In their pajamas, rubbing sleep from their eyes, they watch the predator get apprehended. Hansen has no sense of how inappropriate this content is for his children—he’s too high on self-regard.
The film largely focuses on Hansen’s attempts to snag a prominent person—the White Whale, they call him—which he hopes will bring ratings and glory and, possibly even beat the ABC competition, Lost.
Some of the crew discuss this White Whale at a Subway, as a poster of pitchman Jared smiles down at them. (The film has a twisted sense of humor—Jared, of course, was eventually arrested for child pornography and illicit sexual conduct with a minor.)
The crew recruits a starry-eyed young actor, Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) to be one of the marks. He thinks this is big break but, as a jealous friend reminds him, no one remembers the decoy. In Dan’s first staged sting, a perpetrator whips out his penis. The shocked look on Dan’s face is not acting.
Primetime is directed by Lance Oppenheim with a kind of sinister finesse. It’s a tightly made film—darkly funny, compelling, and archly self-aware. But it doesn’t say anything new. Reality TV is exploitative. We know that. Ambition makes people amoral—we know that too. The film feels more like a clever, entertaining exercise than anything else.
Pattinson is great at Hansen—particularly nailing Hansen’s puffed up vanity (“This is Dateline’s Chris Hansen,” he says, calling the number on the vending machine when his Rice Krispies Treat gets stuck)—but perhaps he’s too interesting? The avuncular TV anchor blandness of Hansen’s face allowed Americans to feel safe in his presence. Pattinson is simply too weird, too intriguing to ever be called bland.
Still, he nails the Tucker Carlson-esque voice and the near glee Hansen experiences when he describes these sordid acts. Much like Dateline’s Keith Morrison who looks like a Founding Father and seems to really love murder—Hansen reveled the “gotcha” moment. Though he’s clearly doing it for the money and status, he buys into his own mythology. “We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” he tells Dan.
And poor Dan, a fan of musicals, who sings “Seasons of Love” in auditions (he prefers the film version of Rent to the Broadway one), is the heart of the film—the Dorothy in this sinister Oz. Freckle-faced Dan, who really does look like a kid—especially when they dress him in board shorts and striped tee shirts—just wants to act, to get a SAG card, to be famous. Instead he’s recruited into this dark underbelly. And he eventually gets good at it. Because that’s how the moral quagmire works. We go from shock to acceptance to complicity.