Primetime

After making his name with a string of acclaimed documentaries, Lance Oppenheim makes his fiction debut with Primetime, and it is immediately clear that he has brought his documentary instincts with him. He remains fascinated by people behaving badly in front of cameras, by the strange machinery of spectacle, and by the thin line between observation and voyeurism. He has the eye of someone who has spent years watching real people reveal themselves, and now gets to construct the circumstances under which they do it.

Set in 2006, Primetime takes us behind the scenes of To Catch a Predator, the notorious television phenomenon hosted by Chris Hansen, here played by a brilliantly unhinged Robert Pattinson with evangelical fervour mixed with vanity, and theatricality. Oppenheim’s Hansen is less television presenter than self-appointed celebrity vigilante, a man intoxicated by power and convinced he is doing “the Lord’s work”. What begins as righteous crusading gradually mutates into something far more disturbing, as Hansen assumes the roles of investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and, eventually, God himself. His mission is nothing less than to “cleanse the world from an ancient evil”. And the public loves him for it.

Hansen has become a popular hero dispensing his own peculiar brand of justice while the cameras roll. He doesn’t simply want to expose his targets; he wants to humiliate them, punish them and make an example of them. Essentially, Pattinson is Batman again, if Batman had a television crew and a pathological need for attention.

The genius of To Catch a Predator was that it transformed television into a modern day pillory, with the predators publicly paraded, humiliated and roasted before millions of viewers. Shame became entertainment. Justice became content. And Hansen became its master of ceremonies.

Oppenheim has enormous fun exploring the grotesque machinery behind it all. The film understands the absurdity of a culture in which moral outrage and prime-time entertainment become indistinguishable.

That makes Primetime both very funny and increasingly uncomfortable. Oppenheim finds comedy in the absurdity of Hansen’s crusade, but there is something genuinely sinister beneath the jokes. The more Hansen convinces himself that he is saving the world, the more his righteous certainty begins to resemble the very obsession he claims to be fighting.

The result is a film drenched in an oversaturated visual palette that is visually daring and packed with genuinely great jokes, exactly the kind of discovery a festival audience loves.

A major contender for the Lido, and one to keep a very close eye on when awards season rolls around.