For years the name of Lance Oppenheim has been repeated as a secret to be kept tight. 2026 is likely to be his year: in addition to the chatter You can see everything, co-directed with Nathan Fielder, the thirty-year-old floridian also debuted for A24 with his first fiction feature (but based on facts actually happened): Primetime.
The film has been in Italian theatres since October 15, but what promises us in the screen?
Primetime: non è solo show business
First years 2000, in the hot core of the reality television revolution. Chris Hansen is a TV journalist who leads To Catch to Predator, a show where actors who pretend to be minors come into contact with alleged online predators and invite them home, where they will find themselves at the mercy of the cameras, Hansen and the police. When the network decides to move To catch to predators in the early evening, the stakes are serious for everyone: from anti-pedophilic vigilant organizations that find the online predators, to the producer Andie, to the actors-esca and, of course, to Chris.
To overcome Lost in the ratings there will be a big, huge story. How far will they be willing to go to find her?
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Lo sguardo nell’abisso
To Catch in Predator for Hansen is more than a TV program: it is a personal crusade, a right battle based on natural instincts that we can all understand: the desire to protect children and the need to live in a just world, in which the wicked are stopped and punished.
But it is precisely in this need of punishment that conceals the uncomfortable truth in front of which Primetime puts us: the more To Catch to Predator becomes a machine of spectacularization of punishment, the more all the subjects involved must begin to deal with its possible consequences. As it begins to count more than that, and no one is exempt from the personal and moral consequences of a reprovent vehicle for pure desires.
Un estro motivato
From a formal point of view the documentary soul of Oppenheim shines in its understanding of the sense of measurement. He knows how to use minimal setups that leave the right space at the performances of Pattinson, Weaver and Gisondo. He also knows when to set up 12-room visuals that operate a real media assault on the spectator’s synapses. Along with his historian DP David Bolen manages to build a rotten and digital visual universe at the same time, but above all never free. Every technical choice is there to serve the history of Hansen’s descending spiral, and never end itself.
That, in this age when visual technique is often used as a piece over a lack of narrative substance, is a breath of fresh air.
Il cast
Robert Pattinson is Chris Hansen, television host on the barter of success and fall. Merritt Weaver is Andie Bender, producer of To Catch in Predator who desperately tries to keep the circus together. Skyler Gisondo is “Decoy” Dan Plumb, a young actor hired to bait the alleged predators, while Phoebe Bridgers plays Del Harvey, another bait with more experience. Anna Faris plays Mary Joan, Chris’ wife, while Alex Winter plays the whale, a presumed predator that could blow up a much larger media case than the program.
L’articolo Primetime is a descending spiral in lo-fi – The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
