Primetime

‘Are you not entertained?’ Russell Crowe’s Maximus bellowed to a leering Colosseum in Gladiator. Those blood-lusting crowds might have enjoyed ‘To Catch a Predator’, an NBC hidden camera show that lured pedophiles into the full glare of America’s TV screens in the mid-2000s. Primetime is never much interested in holding the rapt masses who lapped this stuff up to account, but it’s still a thriller that finds satire everywhere it looks. And as the show’s real-life circus master Chris Hansen, Robert Pattinson puts in his best performance in a golden year. 

Convincingly decked-out by production designer Alex DiGerlando, who remembers what 2004 looked like a lot better than most of us, its suburban, formica-clad kitchens are where the accused are unmasked and left to face their personal ruin by the slick, suited Hansen. ‘You see how this looks, right?’ he asks them – and it looks really bad. But the show’s gotcha M.O. becomes ever more questionable: fresh-faced wannabe actor Dan (a fabulous Skyler Gisondo) is recruited to entice and lure potential sexual predators out into the open. ‘Decoy Dan’ is groomed to attract the groomers. Even producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), a hard-nosed veteran untroubled by too many qualms, is queasy at the corruption of this young soul.  

Director Lance Oppenheim, enjoying career lift-off with this and his Nathan Fielder collaboration You Can See Everything, has a keen eye for the venal, grasping world of primetime TV networks. Bathed in neon lighting like a media Mephisto, Pattinson’s lizardy Hansen is a creature of this media landscape, eyes alive with ambition but dead inside. It’s a performance that transcends imitation.

Robert Pattinson puts in his best performance in a golden year

Screenwriter Ajon Singh, adapting an Esquire article called ‘Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die’, shows what the pressure does to Hansen, Bender and co as the need to keep ratings high sends the team off in pursuit of their great white whale, a mysterious Texan district attorney rumoured to be grooming children. It’s an icky-yet-gripping final act in a film of suburban homes, motel rooms, police stations and TV network control rooms – mundane places electrified by the moral violence of this ill-conceived spectacle.

Primetime is not quite a modern-day Network, but with Pattinson in this form, you’d still be mad as hell to miss it. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Oct 30.