Review: Even the film grain feels filthy in Robert Pattinson's skin-crawling 'Primetime'

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Set us as preferred Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” starts grimy and sinks lower.A pedophile is on his knees in a suburban house, begging for mercy on a tacky peach carpet.

His inquisitor, “Dateline NBC” reporter Chris Hansen (a feverish Robert Pattinson), looms above him like a striking cobra, eyes seeming to hypnotize the man to confess his attraction to 13-year-old girls to a camera crew and soon, a mass audience.The scene is wretched and pathetic and familiar to anyone who caught an episode of the aughts-era radioactive hit “To Catch a Predator,” which televised the arrests of over 250 men caught chatting online with people they believed were children.Less than half were eventually convicted of a crime; the spotlight was their punishment.Shot in grainy pixels and fuzzy pastels with a full-tilt Pattison lurching around, his face powdered to look like “Weapons’” Aunt Gladys, Oppenheim’s variation is “To Catch a Predator” through a fun house mirror — or maybe a mirror in the carnival’s port-a-potty behind the fun house.

The show made you want to soap your eyes.“Primetime” makes you want to bleach them.Looking back, “To Catch a Predator” feels like one of the most pivotal pieces of trash of the 21st century.

Although only 7% of child sexual assaults are committed by strangers, Hansen peddled the paranoia that the boogeyman lived next door, elevating suspicion, vigilantism and public shaming into a moral duty.Our country has been a little more psychotic ever since.

Sex offenders were suddenly everywhere, from pizza parlors to bad B-movies.A24’s sweeps-ploitation drama may deflate the TV host’s ego, but it’s so in love with its protagonist it can’t see he’s the least compelling character in the movie.Last fall, David Osit’s level-headed documentary “Predators” examined the ...