The mass media landscape of the early 2000s is a wince-inducing memory-hole of scandalized fearmongering and celebrity navel-gazing, much of which we’re still living through today considering our second-term with a tabloid president. The bending of reality TV and documentary subjects into confined, pre-fab identities to play to our baser levels of entertainment was hyper-accelerated from the rise in Internet gotcha journalism that looked to scrape the bottom of the barrel as a means of pride. “We’re giving the people what they want,” the slop-artists of the world justified themselves. Part of that peak slop was the television series To Catch a Predator. It began as a more leering segment on the Dateline news magazine show before it spun off into its own primetime specials, with journalist Chris Hansen trying to uncover some sort of psychological insight into grown men who drove long distances to meet up with children they had deeply inappropriate online conversations with. It wasn’t news-worthy but it was pure spectacle and Americans couldn’t get enough. What exactly is this show’s legacy? That’s what Primetime is here to explore in a Lynchian fever dream of style, bold swings, and definite creative license. Amongst all the grotesquerie, there’s an actual sad and haunting perspective here to helpfully measure the depravity, which can become a bit too much of the same muck.

It’s 2006, and Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) is trying to reach new heights of success. His Dateline segment is becoming insatiably popular with the American public, enough that NBC is putting it in primetime opposite ABC’s Lost. It’s a bigger stage and Hansen has to meet the raised scrutiny, with many peers in TV journalism looking down on his exploitation hidden camera show, as well as the National Enquirer extorting him with pictures of Hansen having an affair. The TV show is a hit but nobody feels good about it, and Hansen has to wonder how far he can ride this popularity to greater credibility. How far will the show go, and Hansen with it, to chase the best predators to chase the highest ratings?

First things first, by exploring the failings of the people behind the TV show, Primetime is not equivocating nor mitigating the harm of the pedophiles caught in these televised busts. It’s not excusing their behavior but it does question how much these men would have done on their own without someone on the other line reeling them in for exposure. It’s not like these men were fully entrapped. They made the choice to engage in sexually lascivious dialogue online with children, and they made the choice to meet in person with the strictly stated purpose of sexual activity with minors. They drove the distance, they stashed their vehicles with condoms and lube, and they entered the house with an underage decoy. These men are certainly guilty, but the clarity of their wrongdoing does not wash away the moral queasiness of the TV crew transforming their predatory behavior into righteous vigilante justice for mass consumption. Examining our own darker impulses does not cancel out or minimize the darkness of others.

Director Lance Oppenheim (Spermworld, the forthcoming You Can See Everything) makes his narrative debut from the realm of documentaries and definitely brings a heightened sense of reality to the production. Camera angles are all over the place, sometimes so close to the actors you can see their pores; sets will take on extra surreal layers like the central Predator stage that always has an island in the middle of the house, with lighting that feels like a hellish furnace; the movie is shot on many different video and film formats with different aspect ratios, intermingling the slippery sense of what is real and what is staged. It’s a sensationalized approach that encourages the actors to go big, and the biggest of all is Pattinson (The Drama, The Odyssey). I was spellbound by the man’s performance, a combination of darkly comic neediness and desperately serious intonation. Watching him insist on more takes to nail the right line reading of the perverted text exchanges is hilarious but also a perfect minor detail about who this guy is and what he sees this show as, coming down to a grandiose battle between the cosmic forces of good and evil. I’m not kidding. There’s a lengthy anecdote Hansen reveals about discovering real evil in the world on an international assignment. The movie leaves it open whether Hansen is a true believer or is just using this personal story as a flimsy rationalization for his show. There are plenty of characters who have no such illusions about the kind of show they are part of, particularly Merritt Weaver as Hansen’s producer and chief enabler. Much of Primetime feels like we’re trapped in a room full of ghouls, each subsisting off of human misery and finding ways to assuage their personal guilt and accountability.

Every salacious second of Primetime feels elevated with the filmmakers underlining how exactly they want you to feel. The insights are going to be rather limited as we watch person after person compromise their morals for ratings or money or acceptance. It’s not a very deep look at the show, more of a jumping off point to condemn in every direction. I doubt the real Chris Hansen was as contemptuous or self-involved as the film version, a man who wakes his boys up to watch the latest taping of To Catch a Predator, you know, a show for the whole family. He seems more like a satirized cardboard stand-in of a media figure than a real person. I’m not complaining about the lack of subtlety for such an unsubtle TV series, though it doesn’t degenerate into a facile “who’s really exploiting who?” question of moralizing blame-shifting. I appreciate the overt grandiosity and operatic sense of style that Oppenheim displays throughout, lending the movie a hypnotic and nightmarish quality that would have made David Lynch proud. While watching Primetime might not educate you much as an outsider to the ways of the show, it does convey the grimy anxiety of the moment and its cumulative effect. You might want to take a lengthy shower afterwards to make yourself feel clean.

Fortunately, the movie plays its own narrative bait-and-switch game, a rug-pull Hansen might tacitly approve. The real heart of this movie is the character of Daniel “Dan” Plum (Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring actor looking for his big break. His audition video features him singing a song from Rent before the casting director cuts him off to ask, incredulously, “Do you know what kind of show you’re here for?” He doesn’t, and his complex process of discovering just what will be expected of him, and his response to that pressure, is the missing emotional core of this surreal hyperbolic cartoon of media satire. This young man’s dream is to be an actor and he now has an opportunity that will pay him handsomely, provide accommodations for his travel, and present a primetime showcase that millions will watch. It feels like he’s come far. His more dismissive friend rationalizes, “Yeah, but people watching won’t remember you.” He’s the decoy. He tries to view the role as a character, thinking of back-story and motivation and all the acting techniques he’s learned, but he’s only just the bait. He’s there to be believably underage to lure in the lustful targets, requiring Dan to raise the pitch of his voice or dress more childish. He thinks he’s an important part of the show, and he even gets to have a catch with Hansen like he’s some surrogate father figure, but he’s just another person being exploited. The awkward acclimation of Dan to his work environment produces a rise-and-fall narrative that allows us to witness the changes and harm this job is taking on his soul. The accumulated cost of the moral degradation of the show is exemplified by this man’s journey and how normal it all becomes. It becomes an ongoing question of how much he’s willing to accept and where his breaking point may be. The Hansen performance will get the attention, but it’s this character that provides the unexpected tragedy. As much as Pattinson’s gonzo performance is the draw, Gisondo’s performance is the lasting power.

Primetime is disturbing and darkly comic, satirical and broad while also being dismissively insightful for a drama about a group of people taking it upon themselves to root out pedophiles. It’s got two killer performances, intoxicating style that can also be insufferable for many, and an overall elevated and surreal tone that makes the movie feel bizarre and superficially connected to its topic. There’s plenty to be entranced with here but also a lingering feeling, much like from those who watched To Catch a Predator, that there could have been a better presentation for this material that would catch more than headlines.

Nate’s Grade: B