Primetime Review

Primetime is the documentarian Lance Oppenheim's first narrative feature, adapted by Ajon Singh from Luke Dittrich's 2007 Esquire article about the To Catch a Predator sting in Texas that ended with assistant district attorney Bill Conradt shooting himself as police surrounded his house. Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen in 2006, chasing ratings against Lost with the vigilantes of Perverted-Justice feeding him targets; Merritt Wever is his producer, Skyler Gisondo an aspiring actor hired to play a teenage decoy, Phoebe Bridgers another decoy. It premiered in competition at Venice and opened in the United States on September 25 to $19.2 million, the third best opening in A24's history.

Pattinson is the reason to see it. His Hansen is a voice and a posture before he is a man, the cadence exact and the smile held a beat too long, and critics from the BBC to Variety called it the best work of his career; Oppenheim's own description, a cross between Jerry Maguire and Dracula, is about right. Wever, all nicotine gum and ratings arithmetic, and Gisondo, whose decoy slowly sours on the job, are just as good in smaller registers. The film looks like nothing else this year: printed onto 16mm and scanned back, graded toward the saturated look of 2000s television, with a burnt out 1980s video tube for the sting footage, it has the grain and glare of a tape you should not be watching.

What it has to say is thinner. The screenplay makes Hansen an egomaniac from the first scene, so there is nowhere for him to fall, and critics who had seen David Osit's documentary Predators found little here that film had not already asked better. Some of the lurid style it borrows from the show it is indicting sticks to it. But as a performance piece, and as a portrait of television eating its own conscience, it is gripping from the first sting to the last, and the acting and the craft around it carry it to an A.