There’s a lot happening here.
It’s, like, fifteen or twenty years ago and I’m watching To Catch a Predator after school, or I’m watching clips of it online—I can’t remember which. I’m watching these men, these ridiculous men—in ball caps, in large round frame glasses, in shitty graphic tees, sporting greasy hair, prickly mustaches, perhaps carrying a plastic bag of who knows what—shuffle onto these properties thinking they’re going to score with an underage boy or girl but instead are about to have their lives turned upside down by a wisecracking TV guy who has all the chat logs and cameras to show the world who these dopes really are. Not to mention the scores of cops waiting outside to pounce on the men as they attempt to exit the property. Sometimes one of the cops is even in a ghillie suit, presumably for added effect.
I watch these videos of dudes being horrifically embarrassed over and over again, unable to look away, laughing at Chris Hansen’s knack for making an unforgettable entrance and cringing so hard as the targets realize what’s happening and become so, so small. So infinitesimally small, smaller than the ants scuttling around outside the sting house, their worlds collapsing in on them in clip after clip of weirdly and uncomfortably compelling footage. This is incredible TV.
But there’s also something off under the surface. Something a bit strange that’s difficult to nail down. Why is it fun to watch these lives be ruined on repeat? Yes yes, justice and all that. They came to the house to do a bad thing. But why do I keep watching this? It’s not a question I ever really interrogated until much later, when the ancient spectacle of stranger humiliation became re-solidified in the modern age by the advent of everyone having cameras in their pockets at all times, with the ease of uploading whatever to the Internet with a few taps. You can probably draw some kind of through-line from To Catch a Predator to any number of viral videos on YouTube and TikTok featuring scores of people being recorded and uploaded for all to see. And now we’ve got the Meta pervert glasses to contend with??
This evaluation was not lost on director Lance Oppenheim, who understood the assignment quite plainly with Primetime. This dramatization of To Catch a Predator, of the characters who steered it into television history and the obsessive drive that might compel the host of such a program to put these guys on blast at the risk of his safety and the safety of his team, is a genuine work of art that occasionally feels a bit meandering with its narrative pulls, but nevertheless serves up a suitably grimey portrait of a real life act of schadenfreude, one that resulted in one man’s suicide and the spawning of vigilante copycats who embrace the show’s ethical and legal gray zone for their own channels.
Primetime doesn’t focus much of its attention on the stings themselves, though they are replicated with a great attention to detail that’ll make them instantly familiar to anyone who has poured over compilations online. A lot of the narrative is steered towards Chris Hansen’s insatiable hunger to pilot his predator-catching program into the network spotlight, a mission he relates to a past boogeyman story of his from India, and a young aspiring actor who is cast as a decoy on the show.
The bits with the decoy (Skyler Gisondo, alongside a neat appearance by Phoebe Bridgers) feel a bit distracting to the overall picture. I do appreciate the film’s insistence on shining some kind of light on the folks who were always first to interact with the targets face to face, a great deal to ask of anyone, and you can see how Decoy Dan’s efforts to kickstart his budding acting career might be taken advantage of by a reality show such as this. But his plight ultimately feels like it would be better suited for a different film, especially when it leads to a tacked-on ending that spoils what would’ve been an awesome cut to credits for some closure nobody really needed.
This plot feels even more like a side story when put up against the towering portrayal of Chris Hansen from Robert Pattinson, who imbues the television host with varying bits of drive and mania in yet another fantastic performance from the actor. It’s a remarkably textured and frankly ominous portrayal of a man otherwise mostly known for his stunning one-liners. The Hansen-isms certainly come through here, but they’re delivered with a, perhaps… predatory hunger that isn’t seen in the television series.
Pattinson kills it here, but this would be half the movie it is without the brilliantly tactile and distorted 16mm aesthetic that makes the whole thing seem like dirty, sleazy business. The grain, the boxy aspect ratio, the scorched lighting, all of it helps sell this vision of To Catch a Predator as an almost mythical historical artifact of the 2000s. To see Oppenheim describe the look of Primetime as reflective of the show’s preservation in low res clips online makes the visual choices here feel even smarter. It’s one of my favorite-looking movies in recent memory.
I can’t speak to how truthful much of the stuff is in Primetime. Certainly some liberties are taken with the timeline of events, with the setting and with Hansen’s career, but I love a movie that runs with the hard questions associated with something like this. Are we gonna act like no part of this is questionable? Do we see how this looks?
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