Primetime

Let’s get one thing straight about this thing: Robert Pattinson shows the fuck up.

Whatever unease we’re left with after Primetime’s 110 minutes have rolled comes from Oppenheim’s concept, not Pattinson’s execution of it. The movie is asking us to accept a heavily dramatized Chris Hansen as the vehicle for indicting the real one, who spent much of his career turning other people’s ugliest moments into media hits. Turnabout is fair play? Hypocrisy? Maybe the whole fucking point.

But none of that static comes from Pattinson. The guy commits.

The actor, whose credits include Tenet, The Odyssey, and apparently absolutely nothing involving a wildly successful teen-book vampire franchise despite him totally having the look for it, comes at this at full steam. He gives Oppenheim exactly the sweaty, unsettling Hansen the movie asks for—and at a level of intensity that nearly lets you monitor his pulse through the veins bulging out of his temple.

And, thankfully, Primetime leaves us plenty to think about without also marching through all those possibilities on screen and telling us which conclusions we’re supposed to draw.

It’s not a puff piece for Hansen, to be sure. But neither is it the sanctimonious finger-wag everybody—OK, maybe just yours truly—feared it might become.

At its most heavy-handed, the film certainly gives us its take on how the world reaches a point where it produces a show like Hansen’s. Oppenheim surrounds Hansen with the imagery of post-9/11, War-on-Terror television and makes the connection pretty overt: this was a culture increasingly preoccupied with dividing the world into monsters and the people permitted to destroy them.

Hansen’s program may target real bad guys, but he’s not just some cop who happened to get stuck working that beat. Hansen wants prestige, and he wants to get it doing something superficially noble. Everyone around Hansen is feeding a private appetite of some kind too. And all those little self-interested missions become prepackaged pressure points for everyone else to manipulate.

Oppenheim pushes the parallel even further by repeatedly making Hansen and his crew look, through both their mannerisms and their methodical approach to hunting their targets, a lot like the baddies they’re out to get. This is not exactly buried in subtext, even if it does sit beneath the film’s unique visual glaze.

But the hand-holding largely stops there, and the movie mostly avoids the feeling that it has simply become a meta-Hansenian spectacle itself.

Early praise has understandably landed heavily on Skyler Gisondo, who is firing on just as many cylinders as Pattinson throughout this deeply uncomfortable ride. But there’s plenty more great work happening around the film’s two anchors.

Among them is Merritt Wever, who adds a boundless void of cringe as the excruciating answer to the question: “What if we took Hansen’s obsessive self-importance and somehow made it more . . . corporate?” Oh, and let’s make sure it’s got an annoying penchant for chewing gum.

Phoebe Bridgers—the only cast member whose professional year can reasonably be described as being in the same stratosphere as Pattinson’s—is likewise superb in her first feature-film role.

Anna Faris, appearing so briefly in the film you’re left to wonder if she just arrived at the wrong studio that day, yet again shows her trademark ability to crush roles requiring a little off-balance, quirky sincerity. She’s funny enough to make you lean in and watch, but wounded enough to give you a sense of how big the iceberg is beneath her character’s poignant tip—at the very least leaving you certain that Hansen’s home life is a whole world unto its equally fucked-up self.

If you want a hotter take than that, you’ll need an apron and a cookbook, because I’m going to stop there. A review of a movie this interested in the machinery of judgment probably shouldn’t come with a perforated tear-off notecard explaining the correct way to judge it.

The only critical conclusion I’ll provide is that Primetime is absolutely worth watching.

Some asshole standing outside the theater with a clipboard telling you how much you’re required to give a shit when it’s over, however, isn’t worth swerving for.