“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?”
Robert Pattinson asks this question throughout Primetime. In the role of Chris Hansen—the indeterminately telegenic host of once-popular hidden camera show To Catch A Predator—Pattinson practically turns the question into a mantra. What would have happened if I wasn’t here to stop it from happening?
In most cases, Hansen’s lobbing the question at bad guys. One by one, a “parade of men,” as Hansen calls them in voiceover, shows up at the door of a staged home, which they believe is the parentless household of an underage boy or girl they met online. These men don’t know, of course, that Hansen has mounted a convincing sting operation to titularly catch would-be predators in the act.
Posing as someone much younger, a decoy lures each man (always men, usually in cargo shorts) into the house, where they’re confronted by a concerned-looking Chris Hansen, who emerges from the shadows and beckons the dumbfounded pedophile to take a seat. Cameras capture their shame from ten different angles. “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Hansen asks. The audience shudders to imagine the answer. Cut to: dope in cargo shorts tackled by at least four cops.
This is pretty much what happens in an episode of To Catch A Predator, which began as a Dateline NBC segment in 2004, later peaking as an hour-long reality series before ending in a pool of skeeze and tragedy in 2006. It’s grim stuff that, at the time, was mostly defended as a positive public service. As Primetime tells it, it was an endeavor as polluted to its core as the abusers it supposedly helped put in prison. Regardless, it was a ratings monster.
A pixelated reflection of To Catch A Predator, steeped in the digitally oversaturated aesthetic of mid-2000s surveillance chic, Primetime is a bitter thing, stewing in serious stomach acid vibes. Lensed by cinematographer David Bolen, the film slides further and further into surreality as To Catch A Predator gets bigger and bigger. By the time Hansen’s story reaches its obliterative conclusion—and I recommend not reading the Wikipedia synopsis of the real events before seeing Primetime—every image has been so sumptuously stylized in blotchy beet reds and molten neons that nothing feels real.
Amidst the acrid atmosphere, assisting Hansen is his merciless producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), whose mercilessness quietly molts into something more reptilian over the course of the film. And behind them are a loose cadre of well-intentioned activists and too-online scumbags who help dig up potential sex pests. This includes big goatee’d guy who trolls online pedophile-friendly forums and calls it research, Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), as well as serious professional decoy Del (Phoebe Bridgers), who code switches between preteen girl and preteen boy based on the direction of her baseball cap. Their commitment to Hansen’s enterprise, performed with vibrating zeal by Maher and Bridgers, gives To Catch A Predator the legitimacy it needs to compete with Lost for Wednesday night ratings.
Enter Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), a young, struggling actor with a penchant for showtunes and a face full of freckles. Unsure of what program he’s auditioning for, Dan is unfortunately the perfect fit to be To Catch A Predator’s newest decoy, a barely legal adult of cherubic bearing.
Gisondo imagines Dan Plum as a sacrificial lamb, aware that he’s bound to lose his innocence sooner than later, but who still doesn’t want to believe it’ll ever actually happen to him. A lifelong actor, Gisondo carries that struggle like a dark presence behind twinkly eyes and a toothy grin.
Plus, Plum needs the money, making excuses for what he knows is likely wrong by convincing his friend Troy (Eric Rahill) that what he’s doing—catching all these predators—is actually good, noble work. At least that’s what Chris Hansen told him.
Inhabited by Robert Pattinson, Hansen is possessed. The actor, in peak weird guy form, emits a squeakier version of Hansen’s practiced whine, twisting his body into furious shapes, like he’s exorcising a demon from his past as much as he is from the soul of the world. It’s nothing and everything like Hansen, as if Pattinson’s playing to a memory of watching Hansen on a small cathode ray tube TV. Pattinson is like the real Hansen’s shadow self.
In fact, watching old episodes of To Catch A Predator on YouTube, you may quickly realize that they’re nothing like Primetime. The film isn’t a reenactment, but a seething reflection, a cyber noir soaked fever dream that falls into the liminal cracks between what happened and what definitely did not.
This is director Lance Oppenheim’s debut fiction feature; for the past decade he’s made documentaries. Some Kind of Heaven (2020) interrogates the American Dream via the everyday lives of residents in a retirement mega-community in Florida. Spermworld (2024) is about under the table sperm donors circumscribing the expensive fertility industry and wonders if there is any human biological imperative not yet completely humiliated by capitalism. In Oppenheim’s films, America is not a land of opportunity, but a fenced in pasture on which braying Americans can graze until they’re inevitably exploited for their meat by forces stronger (i.e. richer) than them.
All is exploitation, regardless of whether you’re making a documentary, with prestige funding, for The New York Times, concocting ethically dubious ruses to entrap sex offenders, or just churning out more reality TV slop for yet another streaming behemoth. The truth—filtered through cameras, facilitated by a director, and presented to an audience—is not a faithful facsimile of what really went down. A story that exists to be commodified.
Today, you could never make To Catch A Predator. Maybe it’s because all men in positions of power are pedophiles (haha, um, allegedly!) or maybe it’s because we, aforementioned braying Americans, have so sublimated the idea that reality TV is inherently exploitative that we’ve built whole media conglomerates around true crime.
Chris Hansen’s righteous confrontations are tame compared to how completely we’ve turned people’s generational trauma into pop culture while doing adreads for online therapy apps that sell all your personal information to Meta.
In that unforgiving light, Primetime strikes a uniquely audacious tone. Both heightened and haughty, somber and zany, it’s a film about terrible ends—and the means to those terrible ends—that is also absolutely thrilling entertainment.
“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Toward the end of the film, Pattinson as Hansen stares down the barrel of the camera and asks the same question he’s posed to predators before. This time, he’s looking directly at us, like we’re complicit in all this sick shit we’re witnessing on screen.
What would have happened if we weren’t here? Maybe we wouldn’t have had so much fun at the expense of others.
Primetime opens in wide release Fri Sept 25, 110 minutes, rated R.
