“Can you get tighter in on him?” Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) demands of the technician editing his latest “To Catch a Predator” segment. He has noticed that when his would-be pedophile prey finally spot him, stepping out of an upstairs bedroom or strolling through the kitchen door of the house designed to ensnare evildoers like them, their nostrils tend to flare. Hansen wants that quiver to read onscreen. He thinks people will like to see it. Perhaps in the very same spirit of ghoulish voyeurism, director Lance Oppenheim has designed “Primetime” as a nightmarishly claustrophobic 4:3 portrait of Hansen as a horror villain, macro-zoomed-in as if, past the point of image degradation, approaching the point at which the portrait becomes all but unrecognisable as a human being, we might be able to peer through the sickly sheen of his skin, dive in through one of his pores and see his very soul. Or the place where his soul once, presumably, lived.
In DP David Bolen’s greasy, saturated images, so livid with grain that it feels like they leave dirt under your fingernails, the film begins in 2006 when then-NBC head Jeff Zucker (played, in quite the coup, by Jeff Zucker) calls Hansen and his producer Andie (Merritt Wever) into a meeting. In response to public demand, and rather against Zucker’s own stated preferences, their show, previously a part of NBC’s “Dateline,” is being moved to its own primetime slot, where it will slug it out for ratings against ABC’s juggernaut “Lost.”
