“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?”

This is the question asked in the ambitious narrative feature debut from documentarian Lance Oppenheim, which barks a bit harder than it bites, featuring a deeply unsettling performance from Robert Pattinson as reality television host Chris Hansen. Confronting exploitation and media ethics, the heavily stylised thriller effectively captures a specific moment in American society, whilst leaving a little to be desired beneath its shiny surface.

NBC’s To Catch A Predator ran from 2004-2008 and would feature “decoy” adults posing as minors with the intention of luring pedophiles into their own televised criminal interrogation. Once inside camera-rigged homes, Hansen would emerge and present the predators with their chat logs, in which they had expressed sexual desires towards what they believed was an underage teen. These men would then be handed over to the police, although in reality many of these cases were eventually dismissed due to entrapment issues, a pretty relevant factor which the film chooses to ignore.

Primetime focuses on the series’ final season and the events leading up to the suicide of Texas District Attorney Bill Conradt. Hansen is consumed by his desire to find a “whale”, a predator of high importance, a narrative which would allow To Catch a Predator to justify its primetime slot and compete with ABC’s Lost. His boss doesn’t get the show, and he doesn’t get Hansen – it seems the majority of people don’t. One person who does is his overlooked producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), whose false sincerity is powerfully unsettling, seen in full force as she prepares the newest decoy, Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), for his first shoot.

Pattinson is brilliantly maniacal as Chris Hansen, a man utterly obsessed with cleansing the world of evil (not the worst obsession to have in the grand scheme of things), to the detriment of all other aspects of his life. The self-aggrandising Hansen sees himself as almost a kind of prophet, or as he describes, a superhero; you can see the gleeful delight with which he confronts the predators. Pattinson captures an almost Patrick Bateman-esque egotistical lack of humanity, in an interesting variation of American Psycho’s commentary on identity being entirely performative. R Patz loves to play a freak, and it seems he’s now in his villain phase – after The Odyssey, he’s started to remind me of Billy Zane in Titanic. He portrays Hansen as almost vampiric (familiar territory for Rob), luring people in only to suck the life out of them to sustain himself.

Merritt Wever is electric as the show’s cynical producer/puppeteer, fighting to steer a sinking ship whilst Captain Hansen spirals out of control. Skyler Gisondo shows impressive range as Plum, the only character with any real arc, who’s somewhat groomed by Hansen and Bender. Singer Phoebe Bridgers is great in her debut acting role as fellow decoy Del Harvey, a character I wish we’d seen more from, as she appeared to be the one person with nothing to gain amongst a corrupted team obsessed with ratings.

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This feels like a perfect subject choice for Oppenheim’s first foray into fiction following his acclaimed documentaries Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, and whilst this is certainly effective from a technical standpoint, I found Primetime overly dramatised and thus difficult to connect with. I felt the success of his prior work was in the humanisation of his misfit subjects, and here, aspects of his visual style felt incongruous with the characterisation. Cinematographer David Bolen used 12 different camera formats to recreate the show’s original aesthetic, including a miniature 480p camera typically used for colonoscopies. Combined with grainy, neon-lit visuals (A24 aesthetic strikes again) and heavy colour grading, the film’s visual style is incredibly successful at transporting you back to the mid-2000s. Each character felt like an intentionally unsettling caricature, which unfortunately for me felt misaligned with the film’s intimate framing.

The screenplay includes some great cultural references, but also features unnecessary subplots which lead nowhere. If Hansen’s infidelity is included as an indicator that he had sins of his own, the moral ambiguity angle falls a bit flat – I think catching child abusers somewhat outweighs these extramarital behaviours. Ajon Singh’s script has interesting ideas around exploitation and our obsession with public humiliation, but I found these remained a little underdeveloped. The post-9/11 American consciousness of moral absolutism and violent desire for justice are rightly critiqued, but it feels like a good argument applied to the wrong case.

Ari Balouzian‘s great, stompy score, a trio of stellar performances and Oppenheim’s distinctive visual storytelling create a distorted thriller that’s sure to entertain, but is too disconnected from reality to ever quite hit home. Primetime serves as a meta echo of the original Predator series – overly dramatised, never quite digging deep enough into the issues it presents.