Robert Pattinson is on the hunt for predators in gripping new thriller

Nothing whips pop-culture media into a reliable frenzy quite like panic over paedophilia, a phenomenon too often fuelled by sensationalism — the inexhaustible pursuit of clicks and ratings — rather than any desire for actual justice.

It's an argument that can certainly be applied to television's mid-aughts smash To Catch a Predator, a fraught but compelling synthesis of reality TV and police sting which lured online offenders into real-world traps, using youthful adult actors to play their underage victims.

The NBC show, which ran from 2004 to 2007, was a runaway success. Audiences hooted and hollered at what Jimmy Kimmel quipped had become "Punk'd for paedophiles", while host Chris Hansen was transformed into a national celebrity: America's square-jawed superhero dad taking out society's trash.

From A24's latest golden boy Lance Oppenheim (co-director, with Nathan Fielder, of their forthcoming Elizabeth Holmes documentary), the electrifying new thriller Primetime mainlines that cultural moment, plunging us into the behind-the-scenes drama of the hit show and the demons that drove its host's apparent lust for ratings.

We first see Hansen — played with slick, sadistic relish by Robert Pattinson — practising his lines ahead of the show. "You can see how this looks, right?", he repeats like a mantra, his reptilian lips curled around the famous gotcha catchphrase. Moments later he's descending the stairs of a rented home like Norma Desmond, ready for what turns out to be a very unflattering close up.

In Primetime's sweaty, hyper-saturated imagery, pores loom large on sickly-tinted skin, capillaries threaten to burst, and colours bleed to abstract excess. We could be in one of the late action director Tony Scott's gaudy, surrealistic thrillers — think Man On Fire, or Domino.

It's less a fever dream of 2006 than a dispatch from hell, sound-tracked to Fergie and shot by cinematographer David Bolen on a kaleidoscope of cameras, including vintage digital video and, at one point, a medical endoscope. The effect is period piece as half-remembered fantasy, media reconstituted for a generation nostalgic for the CRT TVs of their childhood.

The blown-out style captures the manic energy of the moment.

Buoyed by To Catch a Predator's rapid rise in popularity, the network moves the show into a primetime Wednesday night slot. Hansen soon becomes obsessed with bagging the ultimate paedophile, the 'whale' that will win him the ratings war against the show Lost.

"We need the spectacular," he tells his gun producer Andy (the always great Merritt Wever), as though he's picking the NBA draft for paedophiles. "The best of the best."

Hansen has plenty to prove. None of his NBC colleagues consider him a real journalist, and the network only seems to tolerate his show on account of its rabble-rousing popularity. Worse, he's being blackmailed by the National Enquirer, who have papped him an extra-marital tryst.

Meanwhile, the show's new recruit Dan (Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring young SoCal actor, wrestles with the challenge of playing a 'decoy' — the adults cast as the show's jailbait. "You have to find ways to protect yourself," advises fellow decoy Del (Phoebe Bridgers), who can shape-shift between teenage girl and skater boy like some kind of Orlando in cargo shorts.

It all comes to a head when the production lands their would-be ultimate ratings ticket: Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt (Bill and Ted's Alex Winter), whose suicide — and the subsequent fallout — would indirectly lead to the show's 2008 cancellation.

For all of its nerve-rattling, deliberately stylised intensity, it would be easy to dismiss Primetime as a little glib, even crass — a deeply troubling and complicated mass-media episode run through an A24 aesthetic filter. And by the time Pattinson is throwing Taxi Driver-style Travis Bickle shapes in a mirror, or buried in a tricked-out homage to 2001's stargate, it can feel like a film in thrall to its own excess.

The real-life Hansen, who had nothing to do with the production, has dismissed the film as a hit piece that paints him as a delusional narcissist while failing to focus on his crusade to save victims.

He's not wrong, but Primetime doesn't aspire to be an accurate portrayal of its subject.

In the movie's telling, Hansen and his travelling circus, as a Dallas news reporter once called them, are symbols of a culture's collective, and potentially dangerous, obsession — sensationalism disguised as moral mandate, and worse, an active obstruction to justice.

It's a film designed to provoke, to slip between fact and fiction, to derange its audience by immersing them in the media and the madness.

"We're cleansing the world of an ancient evil," Hansen declares at one point, a line that Pattinson practically squeezes from between his teeth, seething and savouring its mythic hyperbole. (Between this and The Drama, the man is having a very good year.)

The scene is ridiculous, even comical, and yet it cuts right to the core of a society hell-bent on protecting its innocent, even as it routinely sexualises them and sanctions their systemic abuse.

Whatever its shortcomings, Primetime reminds us what happens when that gets lost in the noise and bluster.