by Flynn Shan Benson
Worth: $7.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Matthew Maher, Alex Winter, Tony Revolori, Jonathan Lipnicki, Anna Faris
Intro:
… a relentlessly unpleasant and strangely pointless study of ego and exploitation.
Primetime is not the biggest film of the year. Nor is it the biggest Robert Pattinson film of this year, though the jury’s still out between The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three. It’s not even the biggest film directed by Lance Oppenheim this year—that honour goes to his collaboration with Nathan Fielder, You Can See Everything. But it still deserves a place in cinema history for being the first film inspired by a Cameo, the platform that lets you hire C-list celebrities and has-beens to deliver a personalised message.
In 2024, documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim received a Cameo starring Chris Hansen, the former television star and host of the pedophile-hunting-reality-tv-show To Catch a Predator — spurring Oppenheim to explore his confected media persona with Primetime, a relentlessly unpleasant and strangely pointless study of ego and exploitation.
The film begins with Hansen (Pattinson, desperately trying to get an Oscar) in 2006, already successful as the host of the hit TV show, but still frustrated that his ‘work’ is not getting the audience and acclaim it deserves. We see him rehearsing the lines he will confront pedophiles with and then striding into the living room and delivering what he thinks is justice — complete with frenetic jumping between different formats and moody lighting. Moderating him is his steely producer Andie (Merrit Wever), who takes amoral delight in the show’s success.
The president of NBC, Jeff Zucker (played uncannily by the actual Jeff Zucker, twenty years on), has nothing but disgust for the show, but still sees the ratings and decides to move it to the highest-rated slot of evening television — ‘primetime’ — creating new pressure on Hansen to deliver thrills and righteous justice in his televised hunt for child abusers.
The bigger stakes of the show coincide with the hiring of a new ‘decoy’ — a gamine adult who can convincingly imitate a teenager and lure the predators into Hansen’s trap. Dan (Skyler Gisondo) is a twenty-three-year-old struggling actor who is overjoyed at getting a part, even if he struggles to convince himself that he’s doing any real acting, or that his life isn’t is in danger.
Hansen is driven to find more and more shocking abusers to put on television, even as the leads become more dubious, the predators more risky, and as Hansen himself finds his less-than-moral behaviour publicly documented. Where this leads, as anyone familiar with either the original show or the conventions of ‘dark’, ‘gritty’ films like this will tell you, is violence and thwarted ambition.
Robert Pattinson gives the worst performance of a distinguished career. His Hansen is blaringly egotistical and self-aggrandising — to the point of waking up his children to watch a new episode of his show — even as he will break into forced absurdity in moments that a cynical critic would say were designed to be clipped and spread on social media.
Gisondo plays the only redeemable character in this whole enterprise, so it’s fitting that he gives the only good performance: despite the challenge of a twenty-eight-year-old actor playing a twenty-three-year-old imitating a thirteen-year-old, he convincingly portrays the boyish naïvete and eagerness of the character.
Primetime ends with an obvious fulfilment of a tragic arc, with jejune morals to draw, from it, but the audience is still left wondering why the film was even made. Its study of the mercenary and exploitative nature of television seems quaint in a world where ‘content’ can be churned out online without editorial guidelines or even human involvement. Nor does it have any depth to add to Hansen’s superficial moral crusade — any consideration of the fact that most child sexual abuse is committed by parental figures, or of the predators like Jeffrey Epstein who would have never had anything to fear from Hansen. For a film so interested in formats and media, there’s not a thought given to this strange confluence of technologies that engendered highly-rated TV programs about crimes initiated on anonymous online message boards. Maybe Oppenheim just made Primetime for the same reason that Hansen made To Catch a Predator: because it’s lurid, and sordid, and there’ll always be an audience for that.
But perhaps Hansen is more relevant today than he seems. After Primetime came out, he put out an episode of his podcast to repudiate his depiction in the film and give an ‘accurate’ account of events. His guest on that episode was one of the top-rated hosts on Fox News.
Hansen remains available to book on Cameo.
