Film Hedonist

Primetime is one of those rare films that:
a) I liked quite a lot;
b) I’ll probably never rewatch;
c) I’m not going to recommend to anyone. Decide for yourself!

Remember Whiplash (2014)? There, drumming until your blisters bled while the conductor screamed at you looked like something noble, almost a liberating transformation.

That film left room to read it as triumph. Primetime doesn’t. It treats obsession with work and fame as a pathology, a sickness of the soul. Its professionally deformed characters have been in the business for years and work without emotion, with the precision of a surgical scalpel. Zero seconds for reflection: the cameras won’t wait.

A hypnotic Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, host of To Catch a Predator. The show is barely known where I’m from, but in America it’s iconic. His Hansen is stuck in a limbo of half-fulfilled ambitions: he’s already at the top, but he wants to go higher, above the clouds.

We watch this climb through the eyes of a young actor hired by the show as bait for pedophiles. What follows is new cities, hotel rooms reeking of cigarette smoke, rising stakes, greedy journalists, and two questions: “How far can this go?” and “When should you stop?”

But it’s the ensemble that makes the film what it is. Without Skyler Gisondo, we wouldn’t see the story through the eyes of an actor who, instead of living out his big plans, has to play bait for predators. Without Merritt Wever as producer Andie Bender, we’d miss the gender layer. The man gets to keep a wife who tolerates his absence in exchange for suburban bliss in a huge McMansion. The woman lives alone in an apartment she never got around to decorating, because she belongs to the job 24/7.

Director Lance Oppenheim, a documentary filmmaker still little known to a wide audience, makes a confident first fiction feature. What could have been a dull biopic takes an artful turn instead, thanks to soft, blurry early-2000s imagery and a saturated palette.

It’s not a film you return to. The world it shows is so dark that stepping into it once is enough.

Some will walk away clean, others disillusioned. That’s the price of primetime.