Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Robert Pattinson’s never been better than in queasy, sleazy predator TV drama Primetime

NBC’s hit show To Catch a Predator was first launched as a segment within Dateline NBC under the title “Dangerous Web” in 2004 – the same year that the network made Donald Trump an instant television star in The Apprentice.

This coincidence was culturally significant. As NBC boss Jeff Zucker (bizarrely playing himself) tells presenter Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson, never better) in Lance Oppenheim’s first dramatised feature, the era of Friends and Seinfeld is over and the imperial age of reality television at hand. 

“I don’t really understand your show,” Zucker says. “I don’t like it. I don’t believe in it. But America loves it” – before shifting it to the prime-time slot of 9pm, competing directly with ABC’s Lost. 

Working with Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), founder of the vigilante group “Perverted-Justice”, producer Andie Bender (a composite character played by Merritt Wever) chases leads from online chatrooms to lure paedophiles to locations wired for covert filming, where they are greeted by “decoys”: young actors posing as under-age teens. 

Once the mark is in the house, often bringing booze or drugs, Hansen saunters in and says: “Big night planned?… How are you doing?” The first such predator that we see falls to his knees, begging for mercy: “I have a little girl at home, she’s only four… It’s just chat!” Unruffled, Hansen replies: “You see how this looks, right?” Yes, the predator most certainly does: “Give me… the electric chair.”

As gruelling a film as Primetime is to watch, it is also a remarkable accomplishment: rich in nuance, emotional power and psychological intensity. Never slipping into moral equivalence – the predators are unambiguously the bad guys – it nonetheless interrogates the motives of Hansen, his team and, by implication, his audience (more than ten million at its peak).

Though the host declares that he is leading a moral crusade (“We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil”), he is, in truth, a combustible mix of narcissism and status anxiety. As he pleads for forgiveness from his wife for his infidelities – “I will be the man you married” – he falls to his knees in an uncomfortable echo of the predator.

Hansen’s appetite for ratings and stardom is matched only by Xavier’s ambition to “get fucking tuna on the hook!” Under pressure from the network to catch “high-impact predators”, they identify a prime target in Texas – whom Xavier believes may be “at the highest level of government.” Hansen asks: “Are we talking about… the president?” The other man nods – and so begins a hunt that will lead to a tragic denouement. 

The film also gives due weight to the traumas experienced by the decoys: in particular, the unknown 23-year-old actor Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo, excellent in another composite role principally inspired by the real-life Dan Schrack). From the start, he is deeply unsettled by the demands of the show but is desperate for the credit that will help him secure his Screen Actors Guild card. It is excruciating to watch Hansen manipulate him into staying on the team – calling him “Decoy Dan” and telling him he is a “superhero… that’s your credit.”

David Bolen’s extraordinary cinematography matches the story’s moral queasiness with a neo-noir aesthetic – deep colour saturation, shallow focus, extreme close-ups – that, in its sheer hyper-reality, sometimes approaches psychedelia.

No surprise, perhaps, that the real-life Hansen, who still hosts a predator sting show on a streaming service and his own podcast, has declared himself implacably hostile to this tremendous movie. 

But guess what? He is cooperating with a forthcoming documentary about his life and career. Almost two decades after the final episode of To Catch a Predator, the grift goes on – and on.

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Matthew d’Ancona

EXHIBITION 

Hokusai: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until January 17)

Cézanne had Mont Sainte-Victoire; Monet, the water lilies in his garden at Giverny; and Bacon, Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. But, before them all, there was Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and his ceaselessly inventive landscapes of Mount Fuji.

And here they all are, for the first time in Britain: the original 36 woodblock prints, with an additional ten designed by Hokusai after the phenomenal success of the initial series. It is a stunning coup for Dulwich Picture Gallery, which has been on a tear this year.

As a revered artist of the Edo period – when Japan was governed by the Tokugawa shoguns from the city that became Tokyo in 1868 – Hokusai, like his younger rival Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), was a master of the ukiyo-e or “floating world” figurative tradition: depicting the everyday life of highway labourers, merchants, courtesans, pilgrims, and teahouse patrons.

As a devout Nichiren Buddhist, Hokusai (who, at the age of 60, adopted the name “Iitsu,” or “one again”, to symbolise rebirth) venerated the mountain on the island of Honshū as a sacred site. But the genius of the prints, notable for their exquisite use of imported Prussian blue, is that Fuji is the still point of cosmic serenity in a world teeming with humanity, floral life, animals and unruly weather (in the three impressions of Under the Wave Off Kanagawa – better known as The Great Wave – the mountain is distant on the horizon). 

Whether it is a man throwing away rice wash water from a cargo boat, or three travellers trying to join hands and circle the trunk of a colossal tree, or a fierce wind sweeping paper from a woman’s grasp, or cranes at Umezawa manor, or the shogun’s falconers hawking in Meguro-ku, or a group taking tea at Yoshida station, the series contains multitudes. Unmissable.

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FILM

Pan’s Labyrinth (selected cinemas)

Twenty years ago, Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece of mythology, Jungian symbolism and Spanish history received a record 22-minute standing ovation at Cannes and went on to win three Oscars. Today, its cultural imprint is visible everywhere in movies, prestige television, graphic novels and gaming: as Mark Kermode has written, it is “a Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema”.

Restored by the Mexican director himself in lavish 4K to mark the anniversary, its re-release on the big screen is a very welcome opportunity to relish anew both its narrative power and its sheer aesthetic audacity. 

In Francoist Spain in 1944, ten-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her ailing pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) travel to the rural military outpost of her cruel stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who is determined to root out the maquis hiding in the forests. Drawn into a magical labyrinth, she encounters a faun (Doug Jones) – an archetypal trickster who sets her three tasks. 

Though rooted in ancient tales of enchantment – a principal source for del Toro was Edwin Sidney Hartland’s The Science of Fairy Tales: An Enquiry into Fairy Mythology (1891) – Pan’s Labyrinth is not remotely quaint or sentimental. There are few figures in modern movies more frightening than the “Pale Man”; emblematic, according to the director, of the institutional Church. And Ofelia’s magical explorations are perilously intertwined with the grim work of her stepfather in the world outside the labyrinth.

A 4K UHD Collector’s Edition will follow next year. To be enjoyed alongside Mar Diestro-Dópido’s excellent guide in the BFI Film Classics series and the newly revised and expanded Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth: Inside the Creation of a Modern Fairy Tale (Titan Books) by Mark Cotta Vaz and Nick Nunziata.

FILM

Gentle Monster (selected cinemas)

“Once you decide to turn a blind eye, you have to see it through”: so says Arian (Anton Rubtsov), a colleague of Munich police detective Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase) as they consider the case of a family torn to pieces by a heinous crime. Arian’s point is that complicity requires commitment. But when does that commitment collapse?

Léa Seydoux is superb as Lucy Weiss, a French musician specialising in pop-classical mash-up performances, whose husband, burnt-out Austrian film-maker Philip Weiss (Laurence Rupp), suffers a serious panic attack in the opening sequence. Along with their young son Johnny (Malo Blanchet), they have moved to the Bavarian countryside in search of tranquillity.

These hopes are dashed when Elsa and her unit turn up at the door, arrest Philip and seize all of his computers, hard drives and devices. Once Lucy discovers that he is under investigation for distributing child pornography, she packs her bags and takes Johnny to stay with her mother Eloise (a striking cameo by Catherine Deneuve).

Though Marie Kreutzer’s compelling sixth feature and Primetime explore notionally similar terrain, the two movies diverge radically in their specific preoccupations. Gentle Monster – which takes its title from Philip’s gruesome online alias – is a film about wilful blindness and its limits,  focusing sharply upon Lucy’s traumatised response to this cataclysmic disclosure.

“I love you so much it hurts!” she yells at Philip, “and I want all of this to go away. Please make it go away!” His lawyer assures her that he was conducting “research” – albeit foolishly – for a documentary. Then Philip admits that there was no such project and claims he was trafficking in this hideous content to make money for their family. How far is she willing to go along with any of this?

A deft subplot is supplied by Elsa’s private life, as the detective discovers that her father Hermann (Sylvester Groth), suffering from dementia, is abusing his live-in nurse, Natalia (Patrycia Ziółkowska). For all her insistence to Lucy that she loves the honest rigour of her police work – “It’s the best job I ever had. It’s the one that makes sense” – she too wishes that the horror in her own family would go away, and, in an especially dark moment, offers to increase Natalia’s wages to persuade her to stay.

No accident, either, that the movie’s prologue shows Lucy working on a version of Charles & Eddie’s Would I Lie to You? This is less a movie about the evil work of lying men, than about the readiness – or not – of those around them to conspire in the deception.