Primetime — The Sordid Theater of Our Friday Night Bloodsport

Lance Oppenheim makes To Catch a Predator look like a horror movie, and the scariest thing in the frame is the audience.

If you had a television in 2006, you remember the ritual. Friday night. The Dateline theme. Then that calm, polite voice asking a grown man why he just showed up at a stranger’s house with a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. We watched those guys fall apart on camera every week and told ourselves it was a public service. It was a blood sport, and we were the crowd.

Primetime is Lance Oppenheim’s first dramatic feature, and it puts you back in that house. Not the living room where you watched, the rented one where they shot it, with the humming lights and the beige walls and a kitchen stool waiting for somebody to sit down. Ajon Singh’s script follows the people who made To Catch a Predator, from the host to the decoys to the producers counting ratings, and it lets none of them off easy. It doesn’t let you off either.

I saw it twice in a week, the second time in a theater on purpose, because the images are doing most of the work and they deserve the size. Oppenheim sees things nobody else is seeing and then figures out how to get them on a screen. His documentaries, Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, already made real American places look painted and a little haunted. Here, with cinematographer David Bolen, he turns a tract house into a horror set. The light goes sick fluorescent blue, then emergency red, then a neon magenta that has no business in a suburb. He cuts between close-ups tight enough to count the sweat and wide shots of empty living rooms held so long that the quiet before an ambush starts to feel like a gun being loaded.

Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, and he plays him like a vampire. Not the smooth anchor you remember. A man pacing in production vans, preening in dressing-room mirrors, muttering chat transcripts to himself until he has that singsong rhythm exactly right. When he finally walks into the kitchen and says “Why don’t you take a seat?”, it lands like a sentence being handed down. Pattinson keeps him very still, the way something hunting is still, and he finds what was always scary under the meme: a guy who believes that making a terrified man sit on a stool makes him an instrument of God. It’s another career peak for an actor who keeps having them.

Pattinson gets the showy part, but the performance I keep coming back to is Merritt Wever’s. Her producer, Andie Bender, never raises her voice and never plays the villain. She’s a tired professional with a spreadsheet and a deadline, and she’s the one who keeps the stings running. Wever lets you watch her do the math in real time: a scared man in a kitchen, a ratings target, a shot she still needs. Her warmth is real, and she will spend it on anyone, decoys included, right up until it gets in the way of the tape. Hansen is the monster everybody remembers. Bender is the one who made the show possible, and she’s scarier because you’ve met her. Most of us have worked for somebody like this.

Skyler Gisondo is the heart of the movie as Dan Plumb, a twenty-three-year-old actor who takes the decoy job because he wants a SAG card. Night after night he pretends to be a kid for the men who come to the door, and you watch the work hollow him out. By the end he has a thousand-yard stare, and the film has made its point without a speech. Somebody had to sit on the other side of those chats, too.

The men who walk into the kitchen get something the show never gave them, which is a little bit of humanity. Tony Revolori plays one of them as pathetic and scared and guilty all at once, and that makes simple disgust harder to hold onto. Oppenheim wants you to see the stings for what they were: a show built to squeeze out as much humiliation as it could before handing a broken man to the police. Then the production rolls into Murphy, Texas, for the real-life ending, and Alex Winter steps into the part of this story the network would most like you to forget. A thunderstorm comes down over the sprawl and the film turns Southern gothic. The house stops looking like a set. It looks like a place where something terrible is about to happen, because it is.

If there’s a knock on Primetime, it’s that the film is so sure who to blame that a few people get squeezed to the edges. Phoebe Bridgers, worn down to nothing as a veteran decoy, and Matthew Maher, all twitch and appetite as Xavier Von Erck, the man feeding the show its stings, are so vivid you want more of them than the movie has room for. It knows exactly what it thinks from the first frame, and once or twice you wish it would let you get there on your own.

But that certainty is also why it hits so hard. Primetime is exhausting, and it hands out no comfort. Not to the men in the kitchen, not to the network, not to the cops, and not to the millions of us who tuned in every Friday. It announces Oppenheim as a real narrative filmmaker, and it leaves you with the one thing the show never let us think about. The monster on screen was never only the man taking a seat. It was everyone watching from home.