Primetime, documentary director Robert Oppenheim's feature debut, looks like it was shot through a lens smeared with bodily fluids, which is both appropriate and disturbing, much like the film as a whole. The imagery is simultaneously smeary and sharp, dominated by lurid colors that seem to bleed out from the edge of the frame and stain the audience. That is the point, I suppose, given the film's inherently skin-crawling subject matter: a recreation of NBC's reality-TV series To Catch a Predator, which, from 2004 to 2007, offered the dubious sensationalist-moralist pleasure of watching traps being set for pedophiles who were lured to a house thinking they were going to get sex with a minor, only to be confronted by the stern-faced series host Chris Hansen and then unceremoniously arrested when they inevitably ran.

As a kind of pinnacle of the early golden age of reality television, To Catch a Predator was a strange blurring of entertainment and justice, television and law enforcement, journalism and exploitation, all of which is clearly central to Primetime. First-time screenwriter Ajon Singh drops us right in the middle of the action in the opening moments, as Hansen (Robert Pattinson) prepares to confront that week's target. Oppenheim and his regular cinematographer David Bolen opt for extreme, disorienting close-ups that, when combined with the often obscene dialogue (which is drawn from the online chats the team uses to trap the pedophiles), puts you immediately on edge. Even when we cut to the wide shots of the meticulous recreations of actual To Catch a Predator moments, we still feel trapped and confined, which deepens the unpleasantness.

The first half of the film is concerned primarily with the nuts-and-bolts of the operation, focusing on the combined work of serious journalist-turned-reality TV host Chris Hansen, ratings-driven producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), and Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the founder of Perverted-Justice, the organization with which the show collaborates to identify and target predators. Xavier spends most of his time in dark rooms in front of computer screens where he chats with pedophiles under various underage guises, hoping to lure them before the cameras, while Hansen and Bender focus on the show's increasing popularity, which lands them in the office of NBC host Jeff Zucker (who plays himself). As a kind of audience surrogate, we get Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), a twentysomething actor who is trying to earn his SAG card and ends up hired by the show to play the on-screen decoy who briefly interacts with each week's target before Hansen makes his dramatic entrance. Dan is naturally disturbed at first by the parameters of his new job (although his initial obliviousness to what it actually is strains credulity), but he proves to be a natural and an important lynchpin the operation.

At this point, Primetime is fairly clear in its endeavors, acting almost like a twist on the classic procedural. We are asked to watch the inner mechanics of a particularly strange operation that nevertheless is focused on the arguably worthwhile goal of trapping sexual predators (if the television audience gets some sick entertainment in the process, all the better, right?). However, the film's second half moves into more conflicted territory as Hansen and Andie, who is being courted by a rival network, seek to push the show by trapping not just run-of-the-mill perverts, but rather a "whale," that is, someone with name value whose entrapment will send the ratings into the stratosphere. Xavier becomes convinced that one of his targets is such a whale, and it turns out that he is right: a conservative district attorney in a small Texas town named Bill Conradt (Alex Winter).

This pursuit muddies the program's already muddy waters, as the purposeful pursuit of a famous target suggests all too clearly that ratings trump justice and money is more important than protecting children. For the film, this becomes an issue because it is never made clear whether this was what Chris Hansen wanted all along or if he just got caught up in the rush, his better judgment clouded by the allure of more fame and fortune and, yes, primetime ratings triumph. For his part, Pattinson, who seems to be everywhere these days (he has had leading roles in five major films in just the past two years), doesn't do much to clarify in his performance, as he plays Hansen in a constant state of turmoil, raging all the more due to his crumbling relationship with his wife (Anna Faris). Is he a good man being dragged down by the sickness with which he surrounds himself, or was he always a moral mess, his words of justice just a façade to protect his pursuit of success? Primetime doesn't offer much in the way of answers, but like its bleary-smeary visuals, that may very well be the point. As Nietzsche warned, the abyss eventually gazes back into you.

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