“Primetime” is a media satire, a thriller, and a horror movie. It’s also about the meaning of the word evil—whether it is best understood as a description of thought and behavior, or a malevolent force. In the end, it makes a stronger case for the second meaning. The characters all fall into one of two categories: the corruptors and the corrupted. Evil seems to be passed from one character to another like a sickness. Sometimes it hides in the dark, waiting for the next vessel to arrive.
Robert Pattinson plays NBC anchor Chris Hansen, the host of the 2000s hit “To Catch a Predator.” Pattinson has a rare gift for playing the sort of man who would toss an old woman over the deck railing of the Titanic to claim her spot in a lifeboat, and he’s been handed a motherlode of sleaze here. Hansen’s program was controversial even before it got into legal trouble for perfecting what some considered a form of vigilante entrapment. The producers used subterfuge and manipulation to draw actual and potential molesters into situations where Hansen could confront them on camera with evidence of their twisted thoughts and intentions and make them squirm before waiting police arrested them.
The movie introduces Hansen and his ambitious, cynical producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) during a sting operation. This sequence and others appear to have been shot with broadcast news cameras from the period or perhaps altered to mimic their look. The first target, a pedophile played by Tony Revolori, is drawn into a camera-rigged house by the show’s designated impersonator of minors (Phoebe Bridgers). It’s the culmination of groundwork laid by one of her behind-the-scenes collaborators Xavier (Matthew Maher), who poses as adolescent girl and boys in online conversations with possible molesters. Right away, the movie makes us wonder if the show’s vigilante mentality (and the lust for ratings it’s intertwined with) can be justified even when it’s aimed at some of the least likable people alive.
Pattinson’s performance increases our unease. His Hansen shows no signs of having struggled with the implications of his job. In fact, one of the film’s unsettling constants is the gleam of anticipation in Hansen’s otherwise lightless eyes before he steps into the space where the sting is being conducted and lets the target sit slack-jawed in bafflement before quoting their own words from transcripts.
The central problem with the show is that its targets might have committed these types of crimes before Hansen and company went after them, but have no arrest records, and are therefore nearly impossible to prosecute for major crimes. That means the show is constantly at risk of destroying someone who is mentally sick but not legally guilty of anything, and exposing the network to civil and criminal penalties, and worse. In October 2006, a producer for “Dateline NBC” anonymously warned a reporter for the now-defunct Radar magazine that he feared one of Hansen’s targets “[was] going to go home and shoot himself in the head.”
Two weeks after that article’s publication, that’s more or less what happened. Hansen convinced the police department of Murphy, Texas to help him snag a powerful target rumored to work in the city’s government, only to have the target shoot himself dead as police closed in. The dead man had been codenamed The Whale because he was expected to become the biggest big fish the show had ever landed. This dehumanizing touch sums up the journalists’ disregard for the humanity of others. All they care about is justifying the decision to move the show into a primetime slot and eventually dethrone its present champion, ABC’s “Lost.”
“Primetime” draws on earlier movies about media ethics, including “Natural Born Killers,” “Network,” “A Face in the Crowd,” “Nightcrawler” and “The Sweet Smell of Success” (the latter two, like this film, focus on dark haired, charismatic hustlers who’ll do anything to get ahead). It alchemizes its influences into something new. It’s grotesque, hypnotic, sometimes alienating. It’s a work that’s meant to be taken seriously but not literally. It bears roughly the same relationship to its real-world inspiration as the story of Amleth does to Hamlet.
Some of the composites, inventions, and embellishments in writer-producer Ajon Singh’s script might give viewers a misleading impression of what actually happened, and how. More attention to the legal risks in the sting operations might have deepened the movie. A subplot about Hansen’s bilious private life as a serial adulterer never connects with the main story in a way that makes thematic sense. The material seems meant to demonstrate that Hansen is a hypocrite for playing judge and jury in his own personal sex crimes court, but history is filled with icons of justice whose shabby private lives don’t invalidate the public good they did. And, in any event, infidelity isn’t comparable to the horrors spotlighted by the show. It all plays like false equivalence, and a rare example of the movie putting an accurate representation of history above the needs of the movie.
All that aside, the movie isn’t interested in recreating events you can read about or watch in a documentary (such as David Osit’s film “Predators,” which features Hansen himself in a study of the impact of his work). It’s going for something stylized, bordering on operatic. By the time it enters its climactic stretch—which is set during a Biblically brutal thunderstorm, and shows Hansen being literally as well as figuratively haunted—the movie has become a neo-gothic nightmare, its characters ensnared in a Twilight Zone of moral hazard conjured by their own corruption.
Two factors might impede this movie’s ability to connect with a wide audience. One is the subject matter. It is, as they say, a lot. The men pulled into the show’s extrajudicial dragnet are identified through catfishing by Maher’s character, a real person who founded a vigilante group called Perverted Justice, which was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by NBC News for collaborating in televised sting operations. The resultant transcripts are quoted by Hansen while he’s putting the screws to the bad guys, as well as by other characters (such as the police chief of Murphy, exuberantly played by Bokeem Woodbine, who gets one of the film’s biggest, albeit most awkward laughs by reading one of the explicit transcripts like a teacher conducting a roll call). There’s also a scene where a target drops his pants on camera during a sting, a rare mainstream movie glimpse of male frontal nudity, though not kind that sells tickets.
The other possible impediment is the movie’s style. As directed by Lance Oppenheim, a documentarian making his dramatic feature debut (he also co-directed the forthcoming “You Can See Everything” with Nathan Fielder), it’s luridly expressionistic in a way that amplifies the disgust that would have welled up in viewers anyway due to the subject. Although most of the movie was shot with high-definition digital cameras, the colors are amped up until they bleed and smear like images on heat-damaged VHS cassette, which makes it seem as if the movie itself is a poisoned, rotting thing that, to quote one of Hansen’s lines, exists outside of time and beyond space.
The performances are so across-the-board excellent that they may balance out the yuck factor. Pattinson plays Hansen as if he’s a pod person who has decided to live among humans, or maybe a minor demon who took a job in TV hoping to corrupt as many people as possible. His inhumanity is disquieting, then scary, and finally, horribly funny. The man is just not wired right. Maher communicates his character’s obsessive zeal to find and punish bad guys, an impulse that can easily mutate into the type of chaotic, arrogant sadism that’s everywhere now.
Wever’s Andi Bender may be the most disturbing of the main characters because she pretends to have a code (mainly professional) but ultimately decides things based on how successful a choice might make her. The actress captures the enthusiastic insincerity and camouflaged heartlessness that’s common on the production side of TV news. Jessica Hecht achieves a similar feat in a couple of scenes as an ABC news producer trying to poach Bender to run a program clearly inspired by “To Catch a Predator.” The character encapsulates a personality type that’s everywhere in the media business but is rarely depicted in movies: California Nice, which has all the outward signifiers of nice but not the niceness.
The secret MVP, though, is Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb, who has no idea what sort of role he’s playing when he walks onto Bender and Hansen’s set for the first time, gets schooled in how to impersonate a minor on camera, and soon loses his anxiety along with his moral compass. When Hansen tries to quiet Plumb’s doubts by telling him, in an appallingly perfunctory tone, “You remind me of my son,” the sudden bounce in Plumb’s step is heartbreaking. There are many closeups of the younger man where you can see the light of his innate decency getting covered up with a tarp so he can impress Hansen, earn a paycheck for acting, and finally achieve his goal of joining the Screen Actors Guild. What does it profit a man to gain a SAG card but lose his soul? This is the question—one of many raised by a film that gets under your skin and stays there.
