Any publicity is good publicity. Any act of social reform can be justified if the intent is right. Primetime asks the colder question underneath both slogans: how far can that intent be stretched before the act itself is the product?
Lance Oppenheim’s first narrative feature, adapted from Luke Dittrich’s Esquire piece “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” does not treat To Catch a Predator as a curiosity from the MySpace years. It treats it as a machine. Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) works the chatrooms, then the doorway, then the camera. NBC has given him primetime. ABC’s Lost is eating the other side of the dial. The numbers have to land.
The film is merciless about what you have walked into. No throat-clearing, no cautionary lecture. You are already in the house.
The first real fracture is Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring actor hired to play the child on the other end of the chat. Once a performer is inside a “real” investigation, the sting is no longer only a trap. It becomes a set.
Dan is told he is doing public service. Hansen’s language is almost religious when he speaks of a certain “cleansing the world of an ancient evil”. He wants the career that comes with being seen. Ajon Singh’s script is smartest here. It does not make Dan a spokesman. It makes him the one person still capable of feeling the job as a job and as a wound.
Primetime never asks you to pretend the men in those chats are misunderstood. They are not. What it will not do is let the camera’s righteousness go unexamined. The predators are the obvious villains. The film is more interested in the people who know how to light a confession.
Singh and Oppenheim refuse the easy sorting of saints and ghouls. Hansen’s private life — the marriage, the affair — becomes content because he is already a brand. The producer across from him (Merritt Wever, steely and exhausted in equal measure) is someone who can feel a rival network circling and still have to finish the job.
These are careers. You go in. You get the tape. You take the big, fat paycheck. When a tragedy arrives as a by-product of that process, the film does not appoint a jury for you. It just lets the question sit in the room: if the ratings required the risk, who owns the wreckage?
Pattinson understands that Hansen is not interesting as a monster. Monsters are simple. He plays a man who has learned that exposure looks like virtue on television. The voice, the stillness, the little theatrical delay before the gotcha — it is all control. What’s unsettling is the hint that he believes his own speech.
Wever matches him without competing, whereas Gisondo gives the movie a pulse it would otherwise lack: ambition first, shame later, neither of them clean.
David Bolen’s camera is an accomplice. It does not observe the spectacle from a safe moral distance; it crowds faces the way a hidden camera does, then holds them past comfort. Eventually, it all begins to look like a close-up in a horror film.
Editor Daniel Garber cuts with the impatient rhythm of a broadcast that cannot afford dead air — grain, hard cuts, the cheap video texture of 2006 — so you are never sure whether you are watching evidence or a package built to be telecast at 10.
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Flip phones, big monitors, structured suits, the familiar beige paint of a mid-2000s sting house: nostalgia is all over in Primetime. Underneath it all, the industry still works the same way. The ending is brutal without becoming a plea for the men the show hunts. Oppenheim turns the lens toward the people who need the hour to air anyway — the producers, the executives, the logic that humiliation is only a problem if it does not rate.
He will not tell you whether To Catch a Predator should have existed. He leaves you with the worse knowledge that the culture already chose, and keeps choosing.
You do not get innocence. You get a preference. You pick your version of brutal over somebody else’s.
VERDICT: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
For more reviews of Primetime, head to the Film Critics Guild.
