Primetime’s Robert Pattinson delivers the performance of the year in sharp, sickening media satire

REVIEW Primetime’s Robert Pattinson delivers the performance of the year in sharp, sickening media satire BARRY HERTZ PUBLISHED 1 HOUR AGO UPDATED 26 MINUTES AGO Open this photo in gallery: Robert Pattinson, one of the great on-screen chameleons of his generation, plays Chris Hansen with a nervy slickness that brushes up against madness, writes Hertz. A24/SUPPLIED COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. Primetime Directed by Lance Oppenheim Written by Ajon Singh Starring Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo Classification 14A; 110 minutes Opens in theatres Sept. 25 Critic’s Pick Is it possible to feel good about getting sick to your stomach? That is one of the many queasy questions viewers of the excellent but nauseating new satirical thriller Primetime will be compelled to contemplate as director Lance Oppenheim and his star Robert Pattinson take you on a guided tour of humanity’s very worst instincts, in which all roads lead to a kind of sweeps-week hell that rivals Dante’s Inferno for divinely sick comedy. In Primetime’s underworld, Virgil is personified by Chris Hansen, the real-life NBC journalist whose vigilante-tinged series, To Catch a Predator, marked an inflection point for trash TV and American pop culture writ large. Airing from 2004 through 2007, the reality show set up a series of sting operations in which adult actors enlisted by the so-called watchdog group Perverted Justice impersonated underage boys and girls in online chat rooms. After the phony teens enticed, or perhaps entrapped, men to come over to their homes for sex, Hansen and his camera crew would suddenly emerge from the shadows to confront and interrogate the would-be pedophiles, the “gotcha” moment quickly followed by the arrival of police officers. ‘This goes way beyond Chris Hansen’: How Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim turned the tables on trash TV It was all lurid, sordid material that unwittingly revealed Western culture’s own inherent perversions – of justice, of punishment, of pleasure – and in Primetime acts as the fuel for a truly bracing and audacious cinematic nightmare. Pattinson, one of the great on-screen chameleons of his generation – and an actor who is currently enjoying a historic big-screen run this year between this movie, The Odyssey, The Drama and the forthcoming Dune: Part Three – plays Hansen with a nervy slickness that brushes up…