Primetime review at London Film Festival: Stylish but superficial

Tortured fiancé in The Drama, arrogant suitor in The Odyssey and now America’s favourite paedophile hunter – Robert Pattinson is having quite the year. He’s at his very best here as the well-dressed, swaggering TV host, Chris Hansen, in Lance Oppenheim’s debut feature, Primetime, a dramatisation of the hit 2000s series, To Catch A Predator.

The opening scene has Hansen reciting excerpts of online exchanges of a sexual nature between an adult man (played by Tony Revolori) and a researcher posing as a minor. When Revolori’s character agrees to meet the ‘minor’ in person, he’s greeted by a decoy in a house fitted with hidden cameras, and Hansen is lurking behind a door or a curtain somewhere, ready to pounce. Soon, he swans in, asks the predator to ‘have a seat right there’ and starts grilling him on his intentions. ‘I’m Chris Hansen, with Dateline NBC, and we’re running a story about adults who try to meet teens online’, he finally says, while a police unit stands outside ready to make the arrest.

The same routine is repeated again and again, and To Catch A Predator becomes so popular that it gets moved up to the ‘primetime’ slot. Hansen and his team must find ways of upping the ante to compete with ABC’s popular series, Lost, which was broadcast at the same time: the more outrageous, the better. They hire a new decoy called Dan (a heartbreaking Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring actor looking for his big break, who does well despite being thrown in at the deep end on his first day.

Things slowly unravel as Hansen and co. go to great lengths to be ‘bigger than Lost’, losing their moral compass in the process. Clothes get messier, hair gets looser, but the film itself gets muddled, too. Subplots about an extra-marital affair and the show’s producer being offered a job at a rival network feel tacked-on, and it becomes increasingly clear that there is simply too much going on in Primetime, while other important things like the legal argument of entrapment remain unaddressed.

Is it about ethics and exploitation? The trauma experienced by decoy actors? Backstage dynamics? TV ratings? What about the abused children themselves? Is it about corrupt government officials? Chris Hansen? We only seem to scratch the surface of the main man, despite Pattinson’s very compelling performance. And what about getting to the root of the show’s appeal – is there something immoral in the pleasure America takes in watching these monsters squirm?

Primetime touches on all these things in a very fleeting, surface-level way. Ironically, then, it feels almost exploitative in itself to use the heavy subject matter of child abuse to make a film which doesn’t manage to say anything particularly meaningful. The excellent performances and stylish, neo-noir atmosphere carry you along, but when it’s over, you’re left wondering what exactly it was that Primetime was trying to say.