Lance Oppenheim has built a fascinating body of work through embedding himself with people and communities whose inner workings are often far stranger than any fictional screenwriter could invent.
From the Renaissance Fair politics of Ren Faire, to the power dynamics of Florida retirement communities in Some Kind of Heaven, to the inner lives of anonymous sperm donors in Spermworld, Oppenheim has demonstrated an uncanny ability to get close enough to his subjects that their behavior begins to reveal something much deeper about human nature. His frequent collaborator Nathan Fielder operates in a similar space with Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, mining the bizarre social hierarchies and psychological peculiarities of everyday life until the line between observation and absurdity practically disappears.
Primetime, Oppenheim’s first narrative feature, takes that fascination with human behavior into much darker territory. Based on the real-life rise and fall of To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen, the film drops us into 2006, when Hansen (played by Robert Pattinson) and his team were riding high. Their controversial Dateline NBC series had transformed the act of confronting suspected predators into appointment television, and now the network has given the show a primetime slot opposite Lost. Hansen wants to make television history. His producers want ratings. The decoys want opportunities. The audience wants a spectacle.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the line between justice and entertainment begins to disappear.
The subject matter is particularly interesting coming so soon after David Osit’s masterful documentary Predators, which already explored the complicated legacy of To Catch a Predator and the ethical questions surrounding Hansen’s methods. Oppenheim doesn’t attempt to make another straightforward examination of the phenomenon, however. Instead, he takes the facts and turns them into something closer to a psychological horror movie about the corrupting power of television notoriety.
It’s immediately apparent that Primetime is not interested in presenting Hansen as some uncomplicated crusader. Pattinson’s extraordinary performance makes him into something far stranger. He opens the film practicing his lines in front of a mirror, repeating chatroom transcripts like a man preparing for a religious ceremony. “I will undress you, and you will undress me.” He says it again and again, changing the emphasis, studying the words. When he finally enters the sting operation, it feels less like journalism than the beginning of a ritual.
Pattinson has already established himself as one of the greatest talents of his generation, and he is unbelievable here. There’s a bizarre and complex emptiness behind Hansen’s eyes, as though he has become so accustomed to performing Chris Hansen With Dateline NBC that he no longer knows where the performance ends. He’s magnetic, pathetic, terrifying and occasionally hilarious, sometimes within the same scene. There’s something a little American Psycho about it, except this is a man who has convinced himself (though perhaps not completely) that his particular brand of narcissism is actually heroism.
Hansen insists that what he does is different from a performance. “Nothing I do is acting,” he tells Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), a young aspiring actor hired as one of the show’s decoys. But everything about Hansen does seem like a performance. He painstakingly practices his lines. He rehearses his confrontations. He carefully constructs the persona of the righteous hunter. Even his own family becomes an audience, with Hansen proudly showing his work to his young sons despite them being unable to understand it. It appears he’s incapable of connecting with them as a father any other way.
Gisondo provides the film’s most crucial heartbreaking counterpoint. Dan initially approaches the job with genuine enthusiasm, excited about the opportunity to travel, stay in hotels and build his acting résumé. He takes the assignment seriously, perhaps too seriously, and his gradual realization of exactly what he has gotten himself into gives the film a human center that Hansen increasingly lacks. Dan’s first assignment is a shock to the system, and watching the production team casually hand him drugs to calm him down before convincing him to stay says practically everything about the machine he has entered.
Also standing out among the stacked cast, Merritt Wever’s Andie Bender is arguably the film’s most fascinating character. She is the personification of television’s eternal push and pull between “feel-good” and “feel-bad” entertainment. She knows exactly what the show is doing, understands the risks and keeps pushing anyway despite the part of her that keeps saying to leave. Hansen may be the face of To Catch a Predator, but Andie increasingly feels like its engine. Wever (Christy, Memory, Marriage Story) almost runs away with the whole film.
Oppenheim surrounds all of this with some truly phenomenal filmmaking. Working once again with cinematographer David Bolen, he gives Primetime a hazy, sickly, saturated aesthetic that constantly makes the film feel like slightly warped VHS footage or a television broadcast that has somehow begun to rot from within. The editing work by Daniel Garber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) is particularly tremendous, cutting between news footage, surveillance imagery and increasingly surreal fictional sequences with an almost hypnotic rhythm that’s essential to the storytelling.
The second half of Primetime feels almost possessed. What begins as a darkly comic media satire gradually mutates into something genuinely horrifying, with Hansen’s pursuit of his “whale” becoming less a righteous journalistic investigation and more an obsessive descent into madness. His talk of how his work is a fight against “ancient evil” begins to take on literal weight, and the film’s imagery starts reflecting his warped worldview back at him. The film’s final hour takes place in a fittingly dour downpour.
That is where Primetime becomes particularly compelling. The monstrous mask Hansen sees on the people he hunts increasingly feels less like a representation of them and more like a mirror. These men are presented as monsters, but Hansen and his crew are exploiting their evil for profit, recognition and entertainment. They rarely seem interested in what happens after the cameras stop rolling. Did these people actually face consequences? Did anything change? Did their work make the world safer? Or did they simply make good television content?
There’s something deeply uncomfortable about Primetime because it refuses to let anyone involved walk away clean. It doesn’t ask us to sympathize with the people Hansen catches, but neither does it allow us to comfortably celebrate the methods used to catch them. The film is fascinated by the morality of executing someone in the court of public opinion, and by the disturbing possibility that the audience’s appetite for punishment is every bit as important as the supposed pursuit of justice.
Exactly what Oppenheim and company want us to feel about all of this is by its end is difficult to pin down. Primetime can be heavy-handed, and its ideas are hardly subtle. But perhaps subtlety would almost feel dishonest given the subject. This is a story about people turning human misery into consumable content, made into a film that deliberately turns that same discomfort back toward its audience.
By the final scene, Hansen’s question of “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” lands very differently than it did at the beginning. The real horror of Primetime isn’t the supposed monsters Hansen claims to be hunting. It’s what happens when everyone involved becomes convinced that the spectacle is more important than the people inside and affected by it. And once the cameras are rolling, stopping the show becomes almost impossible.
‘Primetime’ is now playing in theaters.
