Primetime Review: Robert Pattinson’s Standout Year Continues with Another Strong Performance

Actors portraying real people do not necessarily need to reproduce every detail of their appearance or voice. For every Jamie Foxx delivering a strikingly accurate Ray Charles, there is a Michael Fassbender playing Steve Jobs. Fassbender did not look or sound like Jobs, but he felt like him, capturing the cultural memory of the Apple founder. Robert Pattinson faces a similar challenge in Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime.” He bears little physical resemblance to Chris Hansen, the film’s central figure, and although Pattinson has clearly worked hard on Hansen’s voice, his interpretation remains deliberately uncanny. That is partly because “Primetime” is not a conventional biopic. In truth, it is barely a biopic at all.

“Primetime” is a nightmarish psychological thriller wrapped in pitch-black comedy, examining the idea of Chris Hansen rather than simply recounting the life of the man himself. It focuses on the version of Hansen that has taken shape in popular culture during the two decades since the peak of his NBC series, “To Catch a Predator.” The film is not really a history of that program, either. Viewers seeking a factual account would be better served by David Osit’s documentary “Predators,” which more directly explores the show’s history, its circumstances and the imitators that followed.

Instead, “Primetime” builds a fictional story around what “To Catch a Predator” has come to represent, along with the shadow it has cast over true-crime podcasters, online sleuths and amateur investigators pursuing their own forms of extralegal justice. The result is a disturbing, darkly funny examination of where journalism collides with entertainment—and where justice can become indistinguishable from exploitation.

Our first glimpse of Chris Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson, finds him seated before a mirror, practicing lines taken from a pedophile’s chat logs. In Pattinson’s performance, the vile innuendo and calculated grooming tactics twist and stretch like taffy being pulled toward its most humiliating shape. Hansen does not seem like an award-winning journalist preparing for an interview; he looks like an actor getting ready to take the stage. Later, when someone asks whether the bracelet he wears is an acting talisman, Hansen reacts with offense and insists that nothing he does is performance.

That contradiction drives much of “Primetime,” which dramatizes both Hansen and his work—not strictly as they appeared in the Esquire article that inspired the screenplay, but as Hansen has been transformed in the public imagination: part journalist, part meme. The story unfolds as the network decides to move “To Catch a Predator” into prime time, placing it directly against ABC’s “Lost.” A program supposedly dedicated to exposing predators and promoting online child safety now has to raise the stakes. Beneath the thin layer of moral authority maintained by Hansen and his colleagues lies a more uncomfortable truth: they are entertainers, and their hunger for the most shocking images and sensational moments ultimately pushes the entire operation toward collapse.

Hansen is the show’s ringleader, its public face and the person strangers recognize wherever the crew goes. He savors the attention even as his private life disintegrates, creating fresh complications for the production and his already fraught family circumstances. Oppenheim and Pattinson have described the performance as a blend of Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire” and Dracula. Oddly enough, Hansen also resembles a darker variation on another character Pattinson has played: Batman. His everyday persona carries the desperate, ingratiating charm of Bruce Wayne, while his on-camera identity becomes a predatory vampire feeding on the spectacle of vigilante justice. At one point, Pattinson’s voice even slips unmistakably into his Batman register.

If Hansen is Batman, Decoy Dan, played by Skyler Gisondo, is his Robin: an aspiring actor who signs on as a decoy, only to endure repeated exposure to flashing deviants and other forms of psychological trauma. Hansen’s producer, Andie—played with her usual precision by Merritt Weaver—functions as an Alfred figure, quietly and thanklessly keeping the entire machine running despite receiving little recognition. These characters are also extensively fictionalized, and the superhero comparison is pushed almost to the breaking point. Still, it captures the shamelessly heightened world “Primetime” creates.

Audiences may recognize Lance Oppenheim as the director of Max’s “Ren Faire.” In his narrative feature debut, he reunites with cinematographer David Bolen, using their documentary experience to reconstruct two decades past with an unusual blend of technical detail and emotional distortion. The film shifts among period-appropriate video formats, grounded observational textures, dramatic staging, saturated colors and highly stylized imagery. Some of its most effective passages cut between the show’s control room, where footage is produced and edited, and exaggerated close-up views of the confrontations themselves.

At one point, Hansen says that evil people were once publicly stoned in the town square, but that television has become the modern equivalent. He genuinely believes his work is necessary, even heroic, despite his obsession with celebrity and industry status. Yet he handles the screen like a guillotine. When the blade falls, though, the condemned are not simply beheaded. As Hansen enthusiastically explains to a man who asks whether he ever wants to make the predators bleed, his method is something even more disturbing.

“Primetime” attempts to implicate viewers in the continued popularity of this kind of spectacle. The complication is that the film itself is wickedly entertaining, even as it scrutinizes Hansen, his program and the audience that embraced both. In recent years, many well-intentioned films have provoked laughter from viewers who missed their intended seriousness. Here, however, the laughter feels deliberate. It is hardly surprising that Oppenheim received ideas and suggestions from Nathan Fielder, with whom he is collaborating on the upcoming “You Can See Everything,” about Elizabeth Holmes. The result feels like Fielder directing a collision between Dan Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler” and Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole.”

Still, the film’s corrosive edge is occasionally softened by its pulpy thrills and the pitch-black comedy it extracts from such troubling material. The audience is certainly implicated in the tabloid appetite surrounding Hansen and his work, but the film also makes clear that the people creating this spectacle were having a great deal of fun exploring it themselves.

“Primetime” premieres in theaters on September 25.