The Catcher in the Sty: Oppenheim Skewers Hack Journalist
It’s perhaps fortuitous for Lance Oppenheim’s narrative debut Primetime, which charts the brief but meteoric run of Chris Hansen’s exploitative hit television series To Catch a Predator in 2006, premieres and competes alongside Danny Boyle’s Ink (which reenacts the Rupert Murdoch/Larry Lamb bastardization of news journalism with their sensationalistic revamp of The Sun in 1969, London). Master manipulators whose narcissism led to crossed boundaries which bred on ignorance, titillation, and schadenfreude, it’s definitely worth noting how unremarkable these men ultimately seem when the privilege of anonymity is removed. As far as Oppenheim’s first foray into narrative filmmaking is concerned, it’s mostly a mildly satirical portrait of a banal, mediocre egotist hellbent on achieving the celebrity status he felt he deserved, focusing on the various elements of a business model as perverted as the criminals it was exploiting, poisoning minds already unschooled, hardening hearts suspiciously gleeful to maim, and further cementing mob rule mentality. However, Oppenheim, perhaps purposefully, avoids courting the actual ethical dilemmas Hansen’s labor of hate/love presented regarding societal desires and rituals determined to cannibalize the perpetrators they assisted in creating.
In 2006, Dateline NBC’s wildly successful To Catch a Predator series, hosted by Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), was granted a primetime slot at the network, competing with audience darling Lost. Hansen’s show was designed to catch pedophiles preying on minors by luring them into homes through decoys who coaxed them into acting upon their impulses, the unsuspecting criminals entering a designated address as Hansen stepped out of the shadows like a gloating vampire. The show’s unprecedented run lasted for three years, but the murky ethical limitations of the show would eventually run itself into the ground, besotted by tragedy and scandal, including the suicide of a Texas District Attorney (Alex Winter), whom Hansen was salivating to corner in person.
Pattinson is uniformly vile and aloof as Hansen, a man with a god complex who (in this iteration) desperately wants to be Stone Phillips, co-anchor of Dateline NBC at the time. The hypocrisy of Hansen is on full display, and obviously a microcosm for the country’s insatiable appetite for sensationalism as well, where those who doth protest too much are trying to keep their own skeletons hidden from view. And yet, there’s something missing which would make Primetime truly transcendent, something Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995) or Todd Haynes’ May December (2023) really nailed, in each from different angles—the contradictory reverence America seems to hold for gladiatorial bloodletting regarding taboo subjects, namely sexual aberrations or behaviors for those who were unlucky enough to be born without a silver spoon in their mouths, such as the current president of the United States.
A much more chilling deliberation on Hansen and the history of To Catch a Predator beat Oppenheim to the punch, the 2025 documentary Predators from David Osit. The only person Primetime will inflame is Hansen himself (who has already acted accordingly, making a mockery of himself with middling protests prior to the film’s premiere). But television, and eventually social media, as the modern digital pillory, still depends upon low hanging fruit, the tip of the iceberg stealing all the focus rather than the perfect storm of repressive religious doctrines and ineffectual, diluted educational systems keeping a country well stocked in ignorant fear mongers clinging to puritanical rhetoric. Oppenheim positions Hansen as a Captain Ahab figure looking for his metaphorical ‘whale.’ But empires built on exploitation and devoid of empathy are always destined to crumble.
Still, it’s enjoyable when karma (she does take her time, doesn’t she?) swings around to collect her debts, and Pattison, constantly lensed in putrid pallors by DP David Bolen (who lensed Oppenheim’s 2020 doc Some Kind of Heaven and the intriguing Sperm World, 2024), is entertaining as a figure worthy of mockery. Bokeem Woodbine is a welcome element as a Texas police chief with a Wild West mentality, assured the NBC show will allow for necessary funding he seeks in his department, eventually hungry for blood when a pillar from his community is identified as a pedophile. It’s interesting Oppenheim casts Woodbine as a combination of Chief Billy Myrick and Chief Todd Miller, who were both white. There’s an element of the various American ironies at play as regards assimilationist tendencies—-even those who’ve been disenfranchised, when invited into proximity with powers dictating the social hierarchy, succumb to repeating the prejudice visited upon themselves. America is an endless repeating cycle of victims who become victimizers who become damned, with the court of public opinion constructed by those who would benefit from casting a gaze above rather than below.
Anna Faris appears briefly as Hansen’s chagrined wife, but this almost feels like stunt casting as Mary Joan is basically a specter haunting the periphery of Hansen’s life. Screenwriter Ajon Singh instead chooses to focus on two other relationships, the male decoy played by Skyler Gisondo, and his cutthroat producer, an excellent Merritt Wever. Both have their own specific agenda which are ultimately symbiotic with Hansen, their strained working relationships morphing into a delirious toxicity by the time the television show reaches an inevitable point of no return with the suicide of Texas DA Louis William “Bill” Conradt Jr. Oppenheim makes interesting casting decisions all around, with Alex Winter as the doomed DA, whereas child star Jonathan Lipnicki (Jerry Maguire, 1996) is on hand for one of the more extreme pedophiles entangled in the series’ web. Ultimately, there’s little to learn beyond the reiteration of a basic message regarding how good intentions are often manipulated for the profits of a select few—-the gatekeepers directing us into the hell we’ve helped them manufacture.
Reviewed on September 5th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – In Competition. 110 Minutes.
★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
