Primetime review: Robert Pattinson is magnetic in this unsettling media satire

Lance Oppenheim's Primetime follows Robert Pattinson's Chris Hansen through the staging of To Catch a Predator. The film probes how television can turn morality, spectacle and discomfort into entertainment.

In Short

• Primetime explores morality and spectacle in television.
• Robert Pattinson stars as Chris Hansen with a complex portrayal.
• Film critiques the machinery behind sensational TV shows.

Television has always had a complicated relationship with morality. Give an audience something terrible enough, package it attractively enough, and call it public interest, and suddenly watching becomes a civic duty. Primetime understands that uncomfortable equation and then proceeds to make it considerably more uncomfortable.

Directed by Lance Oppenheim, Primetime stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the television host behind To Catch a Predator, the real-life programme that turned undercover stings into appointment television. Set around the making of the show, the film is less interested in recreating its most notorious confrontations than in examining the machinery behind them: the ratings, the egos, the producers, the performers and the increasingly blurry line between exposing something and exploiting it.

Pattinson is the obvious reason to watch, but the more interesting question is what he does with Hansen. He doesn’t play him as a conventional villain. Instead, there is something unnervingly polished about his performance. Hansen knows exactly how to enter a room, where to stand, when to smile and when to lower his voice. Pattinson makes that television instinct part of the character’s pathology. The performance is often funny, occasionally grotesque and deliberately difficult to settle into.

There is a particularly strange quality to watching him prepare for confrontation as though he is preparing for a performance, because, of course, he is. That is where Primetime finds its sharpest edge. The film isn’t simply asking whether Hansen was doing something morally necessary. It is asking what happens when morality becomes content.

The men being exposed are not the film’s real subject, even if their presence hangs over everything. The camera is more interested in the people on the other side of it: those constructing the confrontation, anticipating the ratings and deciding what makes compelling television. Merritt Wever brings an appropriately pragmatic energy to Andie Bender, while Skyler Gisondo gives Dan Plumb, a decoy actor involved in the operation, a vulnerability that complicates the machinery around him.

Gisondo, in particular, gives the film an important human counterweight. There is something unsettling about watching someone perform vulnerability and fear as part of a job while knowing that the emotions around him are very real. The film understands that exploitation doesn’t necessarily require malicious intent. Sometimes it simply requires a system in which everyone has become too accustomed to the show.

Oppenheim’s direction makes that system feel increasingly surreal. There is a feverish, almost nightmarish quality to the film’s visual language. It doesn’t recreate television’s early-2000s aesthetic simply for nostalgia; the dated textures and heightened presentation make the world feel slightly unreal, as though everyone is trapped inside a broadcast that has gone on too long. This makes Primetime a less conventional newsroom drama and more psychological satire.

At its best, Primetime makes you question your own position as a viewer. You may know that what you’re watching is morally questionable. You may even recognise the machinery of sensational television being dismantled in front of you. But the film is still entertaining. That contradiction is deliberate, and it is arguably its smartest trick.

Where it becomes less satisfying is in how far it pushes its central idea. There are moments when the satire becomes so pointed that the ambiguity begins to disappear. Hansen can feel less like a complicated television personality and more like a symbol of everything wrong with the medium. The film is strongest when it allows discomfort to accumulate rather than telling us exactly what to think about it.
There is also a curious tension between its fascination with television and its own desire to be cinematic. Primetime is critiquing spectacle while employing spectacle itself. That isn’t necessarily hypocrisy. It is part of the point. But the film occasionally seems more interested in making Hansen visually fascinating than interrogating the people who made the phenomenon possible
Still, Pattinson keeps pulling the film back into focus. His Hansen is not particularly interested in whether he is liked. He wants to be watched. And Pattinson understands that difference. There is a hunger beneath the performance, an almost pathological need to remain at the centre of the frame.
That makes Primetime less a film about catching people than about the act of watching itself. The film’s most uncomfortable question isn’t whether television can turn real suffering into entertainment. We already know it can.

It is whether we, as viewers, keep watching because we condemn the spectacle or because, somewhere along the way, we have started enjoying it. Primetime doesn’t offer an especially comfortable answer. And perhaps it shouldn’t.

Primetime released in Indian theatres on September 25.

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