{"id":659873,"date":"2026-10-28T19:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T19:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/659873\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T19:22:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T19:22:11","slug":"primetime-review-unsettling-and-irresistibly-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/659873\/","title":{"rendered":"Primetime Review \u2013 ‘Unsettling and irresistibly fun’"},"content":{"rendered":"

To Catch A Predator host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) buckles under the pressure of his show being moved to primetime.<\/p>\n

One of the most bleakly absurd relics of American television in the noughties was surely NBC\u2019s To Catch A Predator. The news-adjacent show blurred the boundaries between entertainment and entrapment, luring alleged paedophiles to a house full of hidden cameras. The climax was always host Chris Hansen ambushing these men with transcripts of the messages they thought they were sending to a young teen and turning them over to the police.<\/p>\n

\"Primetime\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no surprise that such ethically dubious \u2018journalism\u2019 intrigued director Lance Oppenheim, a documentary filmmaker who here makes his narrative debut. What is surprising for a documentarian is that Primetime, based on real events, is so much a film about acting, of performance as a protection against a sordid reality; that this mission is more about exploitation than salvation.<\/p>\n

Chris Hansen (an electrifying Robert Pattinson) can\u2019t stop playing the role of himself. Set in 2006, the film opens with him intoning explicit chat log messages from his latest \u2018catch\u2019; it is both a rehearsal and a mantra. A recreation of one of Predator\u2019s infamous stings unfolds, and his entrance is the stuff of pure Hollywood, bursting through a curtain and descending a spiral staircase. Suited and with a perfectly styled sweep of blond hair, it\u2019s the costume of a moral crusader, albeit one also hellbent on reeling in enough viewers to justify his new primetime slot \u2014 leading to horrific consequences.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to look away from the screen.<\/p>\n

Hansen\u2019s greatest performance is persuading both himself and naive new decoy actor Dan (Skyler Gisondo, also brilliant) that \u201cwhat you\u2019re doing here is more than acting: you\u2019re cleansing the world from an ancient evil\u201d. Ice-cold producer Andie (Merritt Wever) is immune to his religious fervour but Dan is drawn in, and in a haunting montage we see him repressing his traumatic first on-camera appearance with a predator to seamlessly inhabit a 13-year-old.<\/p>\n

As Hansen unravels, what begins as a cynical media satire descends into a nightmare. The screen is flooded with lurid pinks and greens, evoking Scorsese<\/a> or De Palma, and a climactic nighttime storm is pure horror. But there\u2019s some unexpected humour too; Hansen\u2019s pomposity is skewered (he uses his full name and credentials even when speaking to his wife) without him becoming a total buffoon.<\/p>\n

In making Hansen the villain, perhaps the spectacle-demanding audiences of his show get off too easily, and Primetime lacks the interrogative approach of last year\u2019s excellent documentary Predators, which covered the same material. But Pattinson is so disquieting with his almost mid-century accent and shark-like gaze, especially next to Gisondo\u2019s quiet desperation, that it\u2019s impossible to look away from the screen.<\/p>\n

Unsettling and yet irresistibly fun, Pattinson\u2019s blistering performance as a megalomaniac with a hollow saviour complex is perhaps his best yet, in this darkly funny portrait of what could be television\u2019s nadir.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To Catch A Predator host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) buckles under the pressure of his show being moved…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-659873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}