‘Primetime’ Review: Lance Oppenheim’s Dark TV Morality Tale

It’s astonishing, the sick and twisted things grown men will say to vulnerable children — or rather adults pretending to be children — in chat rooms on the internet, but what’s even more astonishing is that they are willing to try to act on them in real life. This subject affected TV show host Chris Hansen so much that he created a reality TV show about it; ruling the airwaves from 2004-7, his brainchild — To Catch a Predator — lured online pedophiles to a “bait house” where of-age actors, posing as minors, would make their excuses and leave would-be rapists in the kitchen, usually with a plate of freshly baked cookies.

The men were encouraged to bring “gifts” — wine, beer, weed, condoms and even, in one especially bizarre encounter, whipped cream — which only added to the shame of an increasingly worsening situation. At which point Hansen would make his entrance, dressed in a dapper tan suit and holding a clipboard. “Why don’t you take a seat right over there?” he’d say, calmly quoting heavily rehearsed excerpts from a transcript of the damning online chat. Hansen would then double down (“You see how this looks, right?”), and it was this that made the show an almost instant hit: The fear in the faces of these men, who were literally seeing their lives flash before their eyes. Punishment did follow — there were always police present — but justice wasn’t the point of Hansen’s show. It was the humiliation.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, Lance Oppenheim’s tells us exactly what, and his increasingly claustrophobic psychological drama tracks very close to the series of events that led to a very obvious result that took the show off the air, resulted in a flurry of lawsuits and inspired the disturbing 2025 documentary Predators by David Osit. It seems obvious now, but, like Danny Boyle’s Venice opener Ink (and a lot of other titles in the festival this year), Primetime is a film about the way populism fuels moral decadence — but in such a subtle way that its proponents don’t realize it. They usually do, however, when what goes around comes around, which is very much the moral of the story here.

Making his feature debut after a brace of docs, director Lance Oppenheimer has a lot of fun exploring the perfect storm that creates a show like To Catch a Predator. To start with, there is the showrunner’s fragile ego; when the film starts, Hansen Robert Pattinson), is in the shadow of the likes of “serious” TV news journalists, such as 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace (like Ink, this is also a story of a newsman who feels they’ve been passed over). Then there is his producer, Andie Bender (the superb Merritt Wever), whose professionalism will bend and bend until it final snaps in the film’s tense climactic moments. And grounding it all is naïve actor “Decoy Dan” Plum (Skyler Gisondo), a near ringer for Howdy Doody, who sees the show as a stepping stone towards a SAG card.

Having created this monster, Hansen now has to feed it; going up against Lost, To Catch a Predator needs to best itself every week. “We need the spectacular,” says Hansen. “The best of the best.” Which is certainly an odd way to go about saving children from abuse, as Hansen continually explains the mission to Decoy Dan. The pursuit of ratings leads to an escalation of expectations from the increasingly panic-stricken Hansen, whose extra-marital affair has come to the attention of the National Enquirer and threatens to scuttle the show if the right pervert is not forthcoming. His researcher has been in contact with a groomer far more rarefied than the thickoes they usually confront at the kitchen island, and Hansen, like Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, finds his white whale.

It’s an intense and sometimes dizzyingly meta journey — layers of cameras on cameras on cameras — and one that sometimes feels that it could be just as much a critique of a (so far non-existent) Ryan Murphy mini-series as the show itself. Interestingly, though, Oppenheim doesn’t see the media as inherently corrupting; in Primetime, television is simply an empty space, and the desperation to fill it with the lowest common denominator is where the rots starts to set in.

Delivering a performance that the director describes as a mixture of Jerry Maguire and Count Dracula, Robert Pattinson may finally be entering the Christian Bale period of his career, assuming the Academy responds to such dark material (and they didn’t take to 2014’s Nightcrawler, perhaps the closest recent comparison). And though it’s a period film, Primetime really does resound with today’s world, at a time when countries all over the world are turning persecution into sport, with no thought of judge or jury. Most of all, though, it’s a stylish, almost Shakespearean meditation on ambition, that applies to online wrong’uns as much as the media — be careful what you wish for.

Title: Primetime
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director: Lance Oppenheim
Screenwriter: Ajon Singh
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Anna Faris
Distributor: A24
Running time: 1 hr 50 mins