Primetime: Robert Pattinson Gets Under the Skin As a Vigilante TV Host

Just premiered at Venice Film Festival, Lance Oppenheim’s satirical take on the host of TV’s notorious To Catch a Predator show is as queasy and compelling as its subject matter

“I will undress you and you will undress me. As you are a virgin, I will have to put some extra lubricant,” Robert Pattinson incants almost religiously at the opening of Lance Oppenheim’s debut feature, a close-up, red-tinted shot showing his lips slimily enunciating the words. He is portraying To Catch a Predator’s notorious host Chris Hansen and the lines are being addressed, we soon learn (with relief), to a mirror in a rehearsal studio. Then, moments away from netting his latest supposed paedophile, Hansen lurks behind a curtain, waiting hungrily for his unsuspecting subject to incriminate himself on camera. From the very beginning, the line between predator and prey is discomfitingly blurred. 

For those unfamiliar with the dubious format of this once-ubiquitous 2000s show, which has since entered internet folklore, To Catch a Predator posed as a legitimate investigation into the number of paedophiles in different US states. Hansen’s team enlisted a network of Myspace-wielding wannabe vigilantes – self-dubbed “Perverted Justice” – to pose as children in online chats and arrange meetings with adult men who propositioned them. Once they were through the door, Hansen would confront them with the evidence gathered against them. Meanwhile, local police forces were clued in so arrests of alleged offenders could be filmed in real time. It’s enough to know that the pseudo-doc series was cancelled after just one season. And for those familiar with the show’s lore, you’ll know exactly where this drama about the show’s queasy world (appropriately colour-graded a seedy, sickly green) is headed.

Lance Oppenheim made his name as a director of documentaries and Primetime marries many of the themes of his first two features. Some Kind of Heaven (2020) went deep into Americana, getting acquainted with the residents of the nation’s largest retirement village in Florida; and Spermworld (2024) went down the rabbit hole of the sperm-donating digital realm, ferreting out unregulated volunteers on online forums. The casting of Pattinson – a Brit – feels apt in Oppenheim’s latest critique of the oddest corners of American culture.

Pattinson gives what may be the performance of his career as the twitchy, tepid and incredibly phoney Hansen. The actor nails every detail of the TV host’s physicality, and there is pitch-black humour in details as small as a finger waggle or the clumsy opening of a curtain. Hansen doesn’t know it yet, but he is caught in a downward spiral (despite his show nabbing the primetime slot) worthy of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre. There are rumblings in the press of his four-month-long extramarital affair, matched by Chris Welcker and Ari Balouzian’s ominously reverberating score. And when a mega-predator (a “whale”) in the upper echelons of society seemingly takes his team’s bait, luring the man in only means trouble.

Deliciously campy and occasionally psychedelic, the crew’s mission to catch their big fish unfolds in a torrent of web pages from the 2000s, camcorder footage and unsettlingly radiant close-ups of Hansen and his posse. Merritt Wever excels as Hansen’s mercenary producer, pushing for ever more dramatic scenarios as the programme’s notoriety grows. Though Oppenheim doesn’t go deep into the politics, the subsequent discourse of the far-right around paedophilia is more than implied. Tellingly, “the whale” at one point is declared a “Democrat piece of shit”.

Dan Plumb, who earns the moniker “Decoy Dan”, serves as the film’s litmus test of morality. He is brought on board to masquerade as a 13-year-old boy, persuaded by Hansen into believing that he is doing genuine good by ensnaring these potential criminals. Yet as the film progresses, he becomes increasingly ill-at-ease with his situation – spurred even more by the walkout of a fellow actor on the show (Phoebe Bridgers).

Oppenheim’s quasi-horror fiction-feature debut may in many ways be a takedown of the attitudes which allowed Hansen’s show to succeed (and cling on in the cultural consciousness as a string of spin-offs). But the director also appeals to our own morbid fascination with the show’s inner workings, giving the film a slick coating of irony. It manages to be as murky as its subject, and that’s no mean feat.