Somebody get these PEDOPHILES out of here! Fresh off his head-turning performance in The Odyssey, Robert Pattinson isn’t slowing down, as the actor will soon star in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime. He’s set to play real-life television journalist Chris Hansen, during his time overseeing the controversial NBC reality program To Catch a Predator from the late 2000s. On 6 August, A24 released the first full-length trailer for the movie, which will premiere at this year’s Venice International Film Festival and will open wide on 25 September.
While Pattinson was one hell of an antagonist in Christopher Nolan’s summer epic, the actor is really putting on his A game as the antiheroic Hansen in Primetime. It’s good enough to call it now: This is a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination for Robert Pattinson.
It’s because Pattinson is tapping into the simple genius of the film. As the trailer heavily suggests, the real “creep” of the story may actually be Hansen himself. No, Hansen isn’t the one trying to have sex with minors. But under Lance Oppenheim’s direction, Hansen’s camera-ready sheen, glassy glare, and robotic cadence are enough to instil anxiety at his mere presence. Which is definitely how the show’s ensnared pedophiles felt as they realised the jig was up. Or, as Pattinson’s Hansen quips, “You see how this looks, right?”
The movie is set to explore Hansen’s meteoric success with To Catch a Predator—and battling internal politics at NBC—while foreshadowing his show’s eventual downfall. If you didn’t know, the series ended in 2008 after Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt shot himself in front of NBC’s cameras. While the incident was the end of To Catch a Predator, Hansen told Time magazine in 2015 that he felt the show simply ran its course. “At the end of the day, we had proved our point,” he said.
You can watch the new trailer below.
Despite the show’s—shall we say—noble intentions, To Catch a Predator was criticised over its legal, civil, and ethical issues, to say nothing of its journalistic malpractices. In 2008, Charlie Brooker criticised the show in a piece for The Guardian: “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child-rapists, you know it’s doing something wrong.”
Primetime isn’t shying away from To Catch a Predator’s cultural impact beyond exposing neighbourhood creeps or its corrosive ways as a television show. It’s also shaping up to be more phantasmagoric than one might expect. The glowing lights of airwaves and Internet signals take on a hallucinatory shape, like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with close-ups of Pattinson’s sweaty bod that looks like a werewolf on the verge of metamorphosis. Then there’s the dialogue: “Don’t you ever just want to bleed them?” asks a character (likely an NBC head honcho). Replies Hansen, “Maybe what I do is a little worse.”
Later in the trailer, Hansen tells an actor posing as a young boy (played by Superman’s Skyler Gisondo) that he isn’t just acting but “cleansing the world of an ancient evil.” Clearly Hansen is plagued by delusion, which underscores the uniquely bleak atmosphere of Primetime.
Primetime is shaping up to be a mixture of The Social Network and Sidney Lumet’s Network: a psychological thriller dressed up as a nonfiction business drama, about how the sordid chase for television ratings—and, let’s face it, the American dream—weaponises people’s anxieties about the modern world. Yes, there are monsters out there. But sometimes they’re right in front of you, asking you to take a seat.
