Lance Oppenheim’s film is part of a broader eagerness to relitigate the 2000s. But does it have anything to say?
‘Nostalgia’ probably isn’t the right word for what Americans feel about the 2000s – the ‘decade from hell’, per a 2009 Time magazine essay, that gave us 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Depression 2.0 and a lifetime supply of body dysmorphia. Still, there seems to be a woozy fascination with and eagerness to relitigate those times. And as millennials enter their mid-thirties and forties, assuming if not cultural dominance then the kind of professional and economic maturity that gives them more purchasing power, their memories of adolescence and young adulthood are ripe for harvest. Thus, revivals of sitcoms like Malcolm in the Middle; the success of The Devil Wears Prada 2; books like Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women Fame and the Toxic 2000s and Britney Spears’s biography; the return of duffel coats.
To Catch a Predator, a true-crime reality show that aired on NBC in the US from 2004 to 2007, is another such juicy aughts-era phenomenon to have been recently revisited: first in David Osit’s Predators (2025), a documentary exposé of the show’s inner workings and meta-critique of the very concept of an exposé; and now in Primetime, a flashy dramatisation unaware of its latent irony. Not that sensationalised subjects should remain untouched as a rule, but the film’s skeevy recreation makes it little more than a period piece chiseled by moral flattery. A sensationalisation of sensationalism.
Directed by Lance Oppenheim (who also co-directed the upcoming You Can See Everything with Nathan Fielder), Primetime takes place in 2006, the year Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging and the footage swiftly leaked to the Western media; and when the deaths of several prisoners at Guantanamo Bay further intensified public scrutiny of the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror. (Also in 2006: Saw III, the highest-grossing instalment in the popular torture-porn franchise, an unholy union of blatantly D-grade entertainment and the era’s fixation with excessively cruel and righteous punishment.) “Don’t you just wanna bleed em’?” says a man with a Southern drawl seated next to To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) on a flight. This elder gent, a fan of the show, believes that Hansen is genuinely cleansing the world of evil. In Oppenheim’s hands, Hansen might also be drinking his own Kool-Aid, though Pattinson’s smarmy, shifty-eyed performance tells us that these convictions are a means to an end: a primetime slot, an Emmy, a promotion to news anchor.
Such dreams will seem perverse considering the exploitative nature of Hansen’s work, which involves tricking online sex pests into meeting underage boys and girls (played in the show by of-age decoys) in person at a safehouse where Hansen, his camera crew and police forces are ready to catch them red-handed – if not always to be prosecuted, then at least publicly shamed on TV. With a chuckle, Hansen tells his seatmate that the latter might be worse, and, indeed, the decade’s surplus of trials-by-public-spectacle, both in the courtroom (Michael Jackson) and out (Britney Spears), remind us that this can certainly be the case.
In the film’s opening sequence, we catch Hansen rehearsing his lines for the upcoming gotcha as his minions – cutthroat producer Andie (Merrit Weaver) and Xavier (Matthew Maher) the twitchy founder of an anti-pedophile vigilante group who sources the show’s potential victims – circle the outside of his dressing room door. There’s an awkwardness and ambivalence to the events that follow, ingeniously summoned by kitschy Y2K period details that rub uncomfortably against the sombre realities being teased out of hiding. To the abrasive swagger of Fergie’s ‘London Bridge’, the camera slowly zooms out from the rearview mirror of a bush-babyesque abuser hyping himself up to meet his online paramour. Inside, the TV crew scrambles, surveilling their victim’s whereabouts with hidden cameras and chunky monitors that transmit fuzzy video footage humming with tinny audio. When Hansen descends the looping staircase of the rented McMansion to confront the condemned, what he intends to be a heroic monologue comes off as transparently scripted, his smirking artifice by degrees more nefarious than the jittery, would-be pedophile himself.
The rest of the film relishes in this moral murkiness, an effect achieved most convincingly by cinematographer David Bolen’s swampy imagery. In the shitty hotel rooms and empty, carpeted living rooms where Hansen and his team set up shop, Bolen’s colour palette is practically burlesque with its gangrenous hues. Elsewhere, the lighting is blindingly blown-out in an echo of lurid videotape aesthetics. Pattinson’s handsome Hansen seems plucked from a Ken Russell movie, his skin orange against his khaki suits and cheeks lavishly flushed with rouge. The era presented here is a fount of toxicity – a point relentlessly expressed by these visual schemes, which also, unfortunately, become drearily ugly as the film evolves its dark satire into horror with a conscience. Apprehending the past – in this case the very recent past – through period dramatisation entails some degree of revisionism, and here Oppenheim’s rearview perspective adheres too neatly to the contemporary truism that the aughts were very, very bad – closed and shut off from the conflicts of today.
The script by Ajon Singh hinges on the tragic event that marked the beginning of the end for To Catch a Predator: a sting operation targeting Louis William Conradt Jr., a Texas district attorney who put a bullet through his own head when the Predator crew exposed him to local law enforcement. Competing against the TV series Lost, Hansen is desperate to catch a big fish and secure a ratings spike, and when the conspiracy-minded Xavier floats a potential target who may be working for the government, Hansen’s eyes widen with the hope of a Watergate-level bust. Fuelled by ego and delirium, Hansen’s behaviour grows stranger, especially when a tabloid magazine threatens to publish a story about his extramarital affair. That’s not to say his somnambulic wife (Anna Faris, in a tiny, thankless role that seems only to want to capitalise on the actor’s aughts-era stardom) would be surprised.
Meanwhile, a second narrative unfolds about a newly-hired decoy named Dan (Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring professional actor coming to grips with the ethical compromises of his lucrative new gig. A nubile short-king with a cutesy spatter of freckles, Dan is a device for exploring the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the show – Del (Phoebe Bridgers), a veteran decoy, shows him the ropes – and a manifestation of his particular job’s traumatic toll. Decoys don’t stick around too long, so Andie pushes Hansen to play mentor to Dan, and fill the younger man’s brain with illusions about the show’s virtues. Dan overcompensates by treating his job with the gravity of a true thespian. A clip he watches from the television talk show Inside the Actors Studio, in which Billy Bob Thornton explains his Method-acting approach to playing a mentally disabled character in Sling Blade (1996), contextualises Dan’s folly as a symptom of the past’s permissibility, where much more was fair game in the name of showbiz. The film’s sad and sardonic sense of humour largely comes from the tension between the characters’ convictions (in art, in investigative journalism) and the retroactive knowledge we have of the show’s shoddy principles and trashy amateurism.
This plays out amusingly enough in the film’s smirking first half, but as the Predator team nears their white-whale attorney, a surreal seriousness of sweaty close-ups and creepy colour inversions shuttles the story into an obligatory moral reckoning phase. It also, oddly, pulls its punches with Hansen, who, for whatever reason, is cast as a guilt-ridden husband genuinely distressed by what the tabloid revelations might portend for the future of his marriage. Pattinson channels Nicolas Cage-style lunacy to questionably goofy effect, and though it somewhat works to forge his broken-Ken-doll neuroticism, it ultimately trivialises the tearful fallout of the last act. Against Predator protocol, the trigger-happy Texas police force, in cahoots with Hansen, heads straight to the district attorney’s home, culminating in an elegantly edited climax that jumps between the raid, Hansen’s slackjawed visage, and decoy Dan singing Rent’s ‘Seasons of Love’ on the phone to the eventual suicide victim – whose brains splatter against the window to the song’s cheery romanticism. A Hollywood-style judgement day as fake as Hansen’s rictus grin, the film’s crisis is tempered, and arguably undermined, by the film’s winkingly superior point-of-view. And what new revelations does it offer beyond the obvious: that To Catch a Predator was a terrible mistake borne of sensationalistic and punitive times? Well, no matter one’s deeper reservations, it’s always fun to bring memories back to life.
