Robert Pattinson is on a roll this year. With his lead role in The Drama and a major supporting role in The Odyssey already under his belt, and with Dune: Part III still on the horizon, one of his most anticipated performances of the year was his portrayal of Chris Hansen, onetime host of Dateline specials entitled To Catch a Predator (contrary to the film’s depiction, it was never a self-contained, weekly series). Directed by Spermworld & Some Kind of Heaven helmer Lance Oppenheim, the film takes place during To Catch a Predator’s highest cultural saturation point, the mid-aughties, in the lead-up to the fateful day when Hansen and his crew’s participation in a botched arrest resulted in a man’s suicide.

(Please note: what follows is a summary of the narrative of the film, not a fully factual accounting of any real person’s history.) A decade after a trip to South Asia resulted in Hansen discovering the remains of countless children who had been trafficked from villages in the region, he finds himself haunted by this failure to save them. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks and the resulting national hysteria, the “War on Terror” is in full swing abroad, personified in Stone Phillips reporting from Afghanistan, and at home, in the form of Hansen’s personal crusade to entrap and pillory child predators on national television, the town square stocks of the twenty-first century. Aspiring actor Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), believing that he’s auditioning for Dateline’s reenactment segments with the sole intent of getting an official credit so he can join the Screen Actor’s Guild and get his union card, learns that he will actually be used as the “nubile” bait to lure sexual predators into Hansen’s carefully laid trap. Behind the scenes of To Catch a Predator, tensions are brewing between ratings-chasing producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) and slimy cyber-vigilante Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the founder of the Perverted Justice website that Hansen partnered with for To Catch a Predator. Also along for the wild ride is Del (musician Phoebe Bridgers), another decoy whose youthful androgyny allows her to play both young girls and boys.

On his very first day, Dan is traumatized when one of the predators (Jonathan Lipnicki) immediately exposes himself and puts whipped cream on his private parts before Hansen can enter the room. Andie, still distracted by running the show while Hansen confronts the man, half-heartedly congratulates Dan on his performance while also giving him some kind of medication for “migraines,” setting up one of the film’s primary themes: who is the real predator here? This has been a source of discussion online in the months leading up to the film’s release, as conservative reactionaries have painted “liberal Hollywood” as releasing a film intended to demonize a man that many see as a positive force (despite the lack of actual legal consequences for the majority of the predators caught). Although the events of Hansen’s life are remixed in order to make a point about the man’s questionable ethics (Hansen’s personal life falls apart when his wife, played by Anna Faris, learns of an affair, which did not happen until 2011, long after the 2006/7 time frame of the film, and conflates reporting Hansen did about sweatshops in India with one about sex trafficking in Cambodia), I’d argue that it creates a portrait that is more flattering to Hansen than most would believe. We get a clear, understandable demonstration of what the stakes are to him, and while the real-life Hansen has been quoted as saying that he sleeps well at night free of any guilt over his contribution to the suicide of Bill Conradt, Pattinson’s Hansen is clearly shaken, humanizing him in a way that the real-life Hansen’s own account does not.

He’s no hero, of course; there are none here. Despite telling Dan that the credit he should be getting for his role in the To Catch a Predator enterprise is “hero,” it’s clear from the very beginning that the people with boots on the ground are all in it for their own glory. Sure, Hansen has personified the evil of sexual predation into a cave-dwelling monster that he sees lurking in the bushes, but we get a clear picture that he sees himself as “Chris Hansen of NBC” before he sees himself as anything else, including a husband or a father; he even answers the phone for his wife with his full name and affiliation. He has no qualms about showing a rough cut of an episode to his very young sons, even waking them up in the middle of the night to play the tape for them, and his increasing excitement about getting To Catch a Predator into primetime and competing against ABC’s ratings juggernaut Lost shows that he’s more interested in chasing Nielsen numbers than perverts and pedophiles. That carries over to the rest of the crew, all of whom are given the opportunity to choose to do something more meaningful and positive with their lives but (other than Del, who walks away when she feels that the team has crossed a moral line) choose not to. Hansen meets a man on a plane (Creed Bratton) who expresses his admiration for what Hansen is doing and wishes that he could kill every person that Predator entraps, which Hansen finds off-putting, but there’s ultimately very little difference between that man and Van Erck, whose arguably positive intentions are overshadowed by his compulsions. Andie is given the chance to jump ship  to a different candid camera show that creates scenarios in which normal people can rise to the occasion and intervene when they see someone being harmed (What Would You Do?, with John Quiñones), and although she is tempted, she still decides to stay with Hansen and crew. The last we see of her, she’s staring at the blood splatter from a suicide painted on the interior of a house window and claiming that she can still find a way to make this into compelling television.

Ultimately, Dan does end up getting what he wants, his SAG card, but only after leaving the show. Hansen may be our main character here, but he’s static and unchanging, while Dan is the person who is more dynamic. The question of who is predatory and who is preyed upon comes through most clearly in his story, as he begins as an innocent who falls under Hansen’s control. The older man inarguably grooms him. He buys the seemingly underage Dan alcohol at the hotel bar, plays catch with him and compares the boy to his own children, gives the kid jewelry, allows his associate to give Dan drugs, and masterminds the metaphorical machinery that requires Dan to perform youthfulness, innocence, and hairless prepubescence. Each action has a purpose, of course, and doesn’t seem out of the ordinary in isolation, but that’s the point. Predation doesn’t always look like sending explicit messages online, and fearmongering about internet predators deflects attention away from the more common form of grooming, which is usually done in person and by someone that the victim knows and trusts. Prevention of both requires parental supervision, and Hansen’s representation as a largely absent and uninvolved father shows that his obsession with fighting a moral war (for everyone to see and praise) makes him exactly the kind of parent whose children fall victim to the evil that he’s supposedly opposing. 

Hansen’s war was largely unsuccessful, as we can see now living in the world he helped create. Fewer than half of the men who were lured by Hansen and team ever faced prosecution, since the evidence against them was inadmissible due to how much To Catch a Predator skirted the borders of legality. For all the hunts for a “whale” to take down, there was an actual gigantic cabal of elite pedophiles and pederasts active during that time period with massive paper trails, and there’s an argument to be made that making these predators seem pathetic, dim-witted enough to fall for the sting operations, and easily apprehendable contributed to the fact that members of that cabal were (and still are, within our government) operating with impunity. It certainly didn’t put an end to online predation, especially given that it’s moved from shadowy corners of the internet where unsuspecting youth could theoretically be lured into a kidnapping or assault to front-page misogyny that has rotted the hearts and souls of an entire generation of young men. The film doesn’t hold your hand as it traces that line, but it’s there.

Early reviews of the film were marked by praise for Pattinson’s performance, and he is quite strong here. He makes Hansen a human being, even if the portrait is of a man whose quest was in vain. The MVP here, however, is Wever, who does a lot with the comparatively little she’s given. If you’re looking for a scathing indictment of a man whose televised windmill tilting and desire to create a primetime pillory had little real world positives, you won’t find that here, nor will you find a flattering portrait of a reporter whose secondary goals were praiseworthy. You’re also not, as the reactionaries would like you to believe, going to see a story about how the abyss gazed back. This is about people who were given every opportunity to change course, whether it be stepping away from the keyboard and getting psychological help for their illness, backing away from the limelight to have a real relationship with their family, or finding a way to do their work in a way that didn’t cost them their soul, and chose not to. Grim stuff.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond