Highest Recommendation

By Matthew Moorcroft

• Directed by Lance Oppenheim
• Starring Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers
• R

Oozing with film grain and recordings that wouldn’t be out of place on an online forum in 2005, there is a grimey, disgusting feeling to Primetime that only gets more pronounced the further you enter it’s murky depths. It’s the rare film that feels like you need to take a shower after watching it, feeling just as unclean as the lens that is capturing the henious acts both on screen and off the screen.

But the real nightmare begins not with the obvious culprits, but instead the ones seemingly there to bring justice to said culprits. They might have good intentions, but obsession leads down a dark path and it can consume your life. That’s the grey area that Primetime is dealing with, a film less about the events it’s based on and more a reflection of 2000s post-9/11 hysteria and moral rot that has become a commonplace occurrence in American society and beyond.

The vessel for this is Chris Hansen, the personification of “journalism as entertainment” and, for those born in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s, an omnipresent figure at one point who was seemingly doing “the lord’s work”. Pattinson, who has made it a point in his recent resurgence as a character actor to transform himself everytime he takes on a new role, embodies Hansen with a level of ferocity that makes him both a force of nature and a terrifying human being all in one go; Hansen’s position is clear, and he has become consumed by himself. And television is to blame here.

His background in documentaries means Lance Oppenheim, in a narrative debut that’s certainly going to bring more eyes onto him then ever before, is more interested in the background story of the story, so those wanting Primetime to be strictly about Chris Hansen and the making of To Catch a Predator might be disappointed. The real meat of the flick is instead with Skylar Gisondo’s Dan Plum, a fictional creation but a character meant to represent the very real actors and decoys that were used on To Catch a Predator and how they were affected by a neglected network and a boss who was more concerned about the spectacle of the thing rather then the actual morality behind his own concept. In a lot of ways, Primetime is as much as tragedy as it is a bona fide horror flick, slowly morphing into a nightmarish creation that blurs it’s own lines between reality and fiction much like the television it’s inspired from.

That slow descent into a more horrific direction over the course of it’s runtime, with Hansen even being lit and shot much like a slasher villain at points in the picture, gives Primetime a propulsive energy that means it also rides the line near perfectly between stylish entertainment and thoughtful thesis. It’s an audio-visual feast of a flick, and the grainy recordings and mixing of actual news footage gives Primetime the feeling of watching old recordings of a behind the scenes “making of” that was never released due to it’s disturbing material. The deep blues and reds hound the screen like police sirens, and the further you go Hansen’s face itself becomes almost disturbed in the reflection, losing his humanity as he dives further into the depths of evil itself.

For those familiar with the story however, Primetime still has goodies beyond simply that of the spectacle within the spectacle. Where the story is going gives it an almost inevitability to the proceedings, like this was always how it was going to turn out regardless of whether or not Hansen and company lost their way or not. But because it does, and Hansen does ultimately succumb to his darker impulses, it’s made clear that he almost doesn’t learn much of anything and that this cycle will likely continue until the end. Evil never rests, so those that fight evil, or claim to fight evil, must keep doing it at the cost of their own sanity.

It’s impressive how Primetime navigates it’s myriad of ideas without ever becoming too much or over-stuffed. If anything, it’s a remarkably sturdy flick and has one of the best climaxes of the year in terms of unexpected cartharsis. One can’t say that Primetime will be a fun watch for all, but it will most certainly be a compelling one regardless.