Primetime review: Robert Pattinson is Chris Hansen in weird, stylised thriller
David Osit released an excellent documentary about true crime TV host Chris Hansen and his 2000s show, To Catch a Predator, last year, and Predators was so good that it has negatively affected my view of Primetime, which covers the same topic but less effectively.
Lance Oppenheim‘s film follows Hansen (Robert Pattinson) as he travels around the U.S. making the show with his producer Andie (Merritt Wever) and the Perverted-Justice team. They run sting operations in which they lure predators into a house, where they’re expecting to have sex with minors played by legal-age decoys Dan (Skyler Gisondo) and Del (Phoebe Bridgers). Hansen and his camera crew confront them before they’re arrested. Once the show is given a primetime slot against Lost, Hansen becomes obsessed with finding a major-league predator to boost their ratings.
Primetime really suffers from coming out so soon after Predators because the documentary covers the shocking story so comprehensively and really investigates its ethical and moral problems and its lasting impact on decoys, accused predators etc. This dramatisation has been described as a fever dream rather than a conventional biographical drama and that’s certainly true – it’s heavily stylised, heightened and weird. It takes a surface-level, scattershot approach and tries to cover too many things – Hansen’s personal life, the show, Dan’s perspective, and Andie’s career crisis – and spreads itself too thin, not really digging into anything.
Don’t expect Pattinson to give a realistic portrayal of Hansen. The character is based on a performative Cameo video Oppenheim once received from Hansen, so Pattinson’s version is strange, theatrical and exaggerated. But everybody else is playing it straight, more or less, so his performance feels very weird in comparison. I wasn’t sold on it, but at least he sounds like Hansen. Thankfully, I had someone to emotionally connect with in Decoy Dan, an actor who is new to the To Catch a Predator game and our window into this world. He feels like a real person and I cared about his wellbeing.
Despite my misgivings with the narrative and Pattinson’s performance, I really respected the visual creativity and the way Oppenheim experimented with different camera formats. There’s a lot of grainy, old-school footage, recreations of the hidden camera show and a variety of colour grades and textures.
If Primetime is your first experience of Hansen and his show, then it is probably rather shocking and effective. But with Predators still fresh in my mind, I struggled to enjoy Primetime as its own thing and kept comparing it to Predators, and it kept coming up short. Primetime is not a bad film, but if you want to know the real story of Hansen and To Catch a Predator, you should watch the documentary instead.
In cinemas from Friday 30th October