(Check out Anders Ljung’s Primetime movie review, it’s in theaters now. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
There is something almost perverse about Robert Pattinson spending one of the biggest years of his career playing increasingly strange men. Between The Drama, The Odyssey, the forthcoming Dune: Part Three, and another trip beneath the cowl for The Batman: Part II, Pattinson could comfortably retreat into the gravitational pull of blockbuster stardom. Instead, he turns up in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, an A24-backed nightmare about To Catch a Predator, delivering one of his strangest and most hypnotic performances yet.
Pattinson plays Chris Hansen less as an impersonation than as a transmission received from somewhere deep inside early-2000s television. His voice has the slightly unnatural cadence of someone who has rehearsed spontaneity; his posture suggests a man perpetually waiting for the red light on a camera to switch on. Hansen’s famous authority becomes fascinatingly unstable in Pattinson’s hands. He can seem commanding one second and faintly ridiculous the next, a television personality slowly becoming indistinguishable from the character television has created for him.
It is exactly the sort of performance Oppenheim knows how to photograph.
The documentarian behind Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and Ren Faire has always been attracted to American environments that seem too bizarre to have been constructed and too perfectly constructed to be real. With Primetime, that fascination finally finds its ideal narrative vessel. To Catch a Predator was itself an uncanny collision of documentary, performance, crime reporting and reality television: ordinary suburban homes transformed into stages, hidden cameras waiting behind walls, adult actors pretending to be children, and Hansen materializing from another room like some immaculately dressed specter of judgment.
Oppenheim understands the absurdity already contained within that setup and wisely exaggerates rather than domesticates it. His fictional debut feels less like a conventional ripped-from-the-headlines drama than a corrupted broadcast recovered from an alternate 2006.
Cinematographer David Bolen turns that sensation into the film’s defining texture. Digital images bleed into MiniDV grime; colors become oversaturated and vaguely poisonous; faces loom in extreme close-up before dissolving again into surveillance footage. The opening image establishes the vocabulary beautifully. Pattinson’s Hansen emerges from darkness under infernal red light, repeating sexually explicit chat-log dialogue in his bizarrely authoritative broadcaster voice. The juxtaposition is horrifying, but also unmistakably funny. Elsewhere, pinks and blues glow with the sickly artificiality of motel neon, suburban interiors resemble cheap television sets, and night-vision imagery transforms ostensibly ordinary America into something approaching paranormal surveillance.
Even the film’s more ridiculous images carry a peculiar menace. An aspiring actor, Dan (a terrific Skyler Gisondo), is recruited to perform adolescence for the cameras and finds himself inside an acting exercise whose consequences are terrifyingly real. Hansen can suddenly appear within the frame like a horror-movie monster. Television executives discuss human catastrophe through the language of programming and ratings. At its most feverish, Primetime allows lightning, darkness, video noise and surveillance technology to collapse together until television itself begins to look supernatural.
This is where Oppenheim finally seems to find the perfect subject for his instincts. His work has long been fascinated by people disappearing into the worlds they have constructed around themselves. Dreams become lifestyles, lifestyles become performances, and performances become prisons. Primetime gives that fascination teeth. Here, absurdity is not decoration around the story; it is the story’s central moral problem. Everyone is participating in something grotesque, yet everyone can point toward something more grotesque on the other side of the camera.
The film consequently resists becoming a simple condemnation of Hansen or an uncomplicated celebration of the predators being caught. Its far more interesting subject is the machinery surrounding them: what happens when moral certainty becomes content, when punishment acquires commercial breaks, and when journalism discovers that righteousness happens to make spectacular television.
Pattinson thrives inside that ambiguity. There are flashes of the actor’s familiar appetite for grotesquerie, including the vocal affectations, strange physical choices and sudden eruptions of ego, but the performance never becomes parody. His Hansen believes in the importance of what he is doing, and that conviction makes his increasing attraction to spectacle considerably more disturbing. Pattinson understands that the funniest possible version of Hansen is also the scariest: a man who has become so fluent in his own persona that sincerity and performance are no longer separable.
It makes Primetime another reminder of how unusually Pattinson has handled movie stardom. Few actors could move between Nolan, Villeneuve and Reeves while still seeming genuinely hungry for something this grubby, abrasive and formally strange. There is no sense of an indie film functioning as an artistic palate cleanser between franchises. Pattinson attacks Primetime with the intensity of someone who considers playing Chris Hansen every bit as worthy of obsession as playing Batman.
Oppenheim meets him there. Primetime is lurid, occasionally hysterical and deliberately contaminated by the television culture it examines. But that excess is precisely what makes it work. Rather than clean up an ugly chapter of American media history into respectable prestige cinema, Oppenheim lets the images rot. The result looks like television remembering its own worst impulses, only to discover somewhere inside the static that it enjoyed them.
– Anders Ljung
