"Primetime" asks us who a bad person is Presented in competition at Venice 83, Lance Oppenheim's film tells the story of "To Catch a Predator"

Lance Oppenheim has always had a knack for finding compelling subjects. Working in documentary film, in 2020 he told the story of the elderly community at The Villages in Some Kind of Heaven, the largest retirement community in all of America, while in 2024 he directed the documentary Spermworld for television, weaving together the stories of several American sperm donors and their peculiar retail trade.

For his fiction debut, he needed to find a story worthy of his previous work — and he found it in the show To Catch a Predator, hosted by Chris Hansen for Primetime, a film about the Dateline NBC program that became notorious for its sensationalistic method of entrapping pedophiles and broadcasting the results as television segments.

No thesis, only questions

The film, set in 2006, is based on a true story, though many of its elements are fictionalized. Oppenheim brings his signature look of burnt tones and washed-out saturation, hovering between cinematic and televisual aesthetics, and relies on a screenplay by Ajon Singh. If in his documentaries Oppenheim often veered vertiginously toward fiction, in fiction he seeks out residues of reality lurking behind the construction of his images.

This ambiguity allows him to escape the rigid logic that often governs a story's themes. Here, he offers the audience no thesis, but instead lets them form their own. While his reproach toward Hansen and his team is clear, Primetime interrogates its characters — and by extension its viewers — about the standards of judgment people rely on when deciding who is evil and why.

Casting themselves as self-appointed sheriffs, the To Catch a Predator team believes it holds justice in its hands, and it does so for two reasons: both because their moral compass is, or at least appears to be, cleaner than that of those who end up on the program, and because nothing could be more serious than what the sexual predators they expose are doing. This justifies a Wild West attitude pursued for pure entertainment purposes.

Who is innocent?

The criteria go haywire when the crime is serious enough. But how does one calibrate this, and who decides that a person should act in place of those whose job it actually is? Is it because we see ourselves as above any choice that might be made? This is not about empathizing with men who groom children online. The film tries to understand who can truly be called a bad person, opening up stimulating interpretations. Lance Oppenheim gives us free rein, refusing to place himself a few steps above it all, and instead trying to understand what led so many viewers to follow a program that most considered a public service.

After all, none of the "good guys" is innocent. Hansen is having an extramarital affair, producer Lynn Keller has a taste for morally dubious content to serve up to audiences, and aspiring actor Dan Plum agrees to work as a decoy simply to feel validated, hoping to earn a place in the actors' union.

Every home has its guillotine

With the camera lens trained on them, everything is amplified. To imprison a criminal within the rectangle of a screen is to chain them forever to their shame — shame that the viewers watching from home, as though gazing at meat on a slab, do not share: "Every town once had its guillotine; today every home has a television," the protagonist says.

The screen commodifies violence, pain, and shock, which, feeding off one another and never satisfied, must constantly outdo themselves — often for the worse. Here, the bar is raised by the pursuit of the "whale" for the program, in pure Moby Dick symbolism. Even so, no one is let off the hook, as the film notes how the shows people most loudly claim never to watch are invariably the ones with the highest ratings — and if that is what audiences demand, it is exactly what Chris Hansen is ready to give them.

Helpless spectators

Primetime, led by a strong Robert Pattinson and equally impressive co-stars Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo, digs into a primordial evil that modern society has seized upon and reshaped, always navigating the boundaries of what is served up to us and what we consume — content we demand to be ever more outrageous and violent. It is a drift of the camera's eye and the degeneration visited upon the small screen.

A further reminder — following Ink, presented at Venice 83 in competition alongside Primetime — that information has been handed over to scoundrels and that we are all helpless spectators. And in the meantime, we watch yet another aggressive, overbearing, savage, humiliating, and vulgar program to distract ourselves, convinced that we are superior to those out there, or on the other side of the screen.