‘Primetime’ REVIEW: The Seduction of Moral Certainty
‘Primetime’ REVIEW: The Seduction of Moral Certainty
Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen in ‘Primetime’ / Photo courtesy of A24
The unsettling legacy of To Catch a Predator comes from the fact that its moral purpose was inseparable from its methods: television producers were exposing men who appeared willing to harm children while also turning humiliation, fear, and arrest into scheduled entertainment. Chris Hansen became the reassuring face of that contradiction, a journalist whose calm authority allowed millions of viewers to feel that watching another person’s destruction could be both public service and prime-time television. Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime understands that simply dramatizing the history of To Catch a Predator would be less interesting than examining the mentality that could create it.
Set in 2006, Primetime follows Chris Hansen (played by Robert Pattinson) at the height of To Catch a Predator as the show’s success pushes him toward greater ambition, risk, and moral compromise.
Pattinson plays Hansen as a man who increasingly believes his television persona and his moral authority are the same thing. He walks into every room expecting attention to arrange itself around him. The frightening part of the performance is that Hansen rarely appears to recognize this as vanity. He has convinced himself that the importance of the mission validates almost anything required to keep it alive.
That is where Pattinson becomes essential to the film. His version of Hansen could easily have turned into a broad impersonation, especially because the real Hansen developed such a recognizable cadence and screen presence. Pattinson instead builds the character around appetite. Hansen wants ratings, professional respect, obedience from his staff, and the feeling that he is standing on the correct side of a moral line. He does not experience those desires as contradictions. Pattinson lets them coexist until the distinction between exposing wrongdoing and needing wrongdoing to exist becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.
Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen and Tony Revolori as an unnamed pedophile / Photo courtesy of A24
Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh wisely begin after To Catch a Predator has already found an audience. A conventional biopic would probably explain how the concept was created and chart Hansen’s rise. Primetime is more interested in what happens after a television format discovers that fear is profitable. The movie invents some circumstances around the pressure Hansen faces, including Jeff Zucker appearing as himself, because historical reconstruction is secondary to psychological pressure.
The approach works because the film is studying a system in which journalistic purpose, institutional ambition, and personal ego continually strengthen one another. A successful investigation creates demand for another episode, which creates demand for a more dramatic confrontation, which eventually changes the people producing it.
Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb / Photo courtesy of A24
The film’s strongest choice is refusing to make Hansen the only person affected by that process. Skyler Gisondo’s Dan Plumb gradually becomes the emotional center of the story. Dan is a young actor who joins the operation to play teenagers during the stings, initially viewing the work as another possible step toward a legitimate acting career. Gisondo gives him an eagerness that feels painfully ordinary. He wants approval from people who appear successful, and the production offers him a way to feel useful while advancing professionally.
That combination makes his ethical deterioration more disturbing because there is no dramatic moment when Dan suddenly becomes corrupt. He learns what the people around him reward, then slowly becomes better at providing it.
The film’s visual aggression also makes sense in that context. Oppenheim does not shoot Primetime like a prestige newsroom drama. David Bolen’s cinematography embraces the ugly textures of mid-2000s television, harsh interiors, surveillance imagery, cheap suburban rooms, and images that sometimes seem contaminated by the material being recorded. Ari Balouzian’s score pushes the movie further toward psychological horror. The style can be exhausting, but restraint would have weakened the film’s point.
To Catch a Predator depended on converting something horrifying into recognizable television grammar: hidden cameras, entrances timed for maximum effect, confrontations shaped around commercial breaks, and the familiar presence of Hansen waiting with transcripts in hand. Oppenheim exaggerates those qualities until the machinery becomes impossible to overlook.
Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen and Bob Ari as the Rabbi / Photo courtesy of A24
That decision explains the movie’s strange movement between comedy and horror. Some scenes are funny because the production surrounding Hansen is ridiculous. Adults are staging elaborate suburban traps while discussing television logistics with complete seriousness. Yet the humor never erases what brought everyone into the house. Oppenheim keeps forcing those realities into the same frame, which creates an uneasiness more useful than solemnity would have been. The audience understands why viewers found Hansen satisfying to watch. Seeing an alleged predator confronted with his own messages carries an obvious emotional appeal.
Primetime works because it recognizes the legitimate horror of adults seeking sexual contact with minors while examining what happens when their exposure becomes dependent on cameras, ratings, careers, and public appetite. Hansen’s deepest failure in the film is therefore larger than hypocrisy. He gradually loses the ability to distinguish the importance of the work from the importance of himself.
In the end, Oppenheim’s Primetime suggests that moral certainty can reveal something ugly in the people who possess it as easily as in the people they condemn. Human beings want justice, but we also enjoy the relief of knowing exactly who the villain is, especially when that certainty allows us to feel innocent by comparison. The film works because it refuses to let that innocence survive intact. Hansen spends the film looking across the room at men he believes have exposed their true nature; by the end, the camera has turned the same question back on everyone watching.
‘Primetime’ is now showing exclusively in SM cinemas.
