Primetime review: Robert Pattinson is extraordinary as controversial paedophile-hunter Chris Hansen ★★★★★

Pattinson has been having an exceptional year on screen – and that continues with his dizzying performance in this dark media satire about 2000s US reality TV show To Catch a Predator.

Has any actor as handsome as Robert Pattinson ever played so many ugly-on-the-inside people? It took him a few years to find roles that suited him after the Twilight franchise turned him into a teen idol, but the likes of Good Time, The Lighthouse, Mickey 17, and Die My Love have established him as a major figure in today's art-house cinema.

He has also shone in more conventional high-profile films, notably The Batman, but in general he prefers not to be a heroic leading man, choosing instead the least flattering roles imaginable: a rogue's gallery of losers, liars, and on-edge sleazebags. He seems to delight in playing unsavoury characters – and because he enjoys it so much, so do we.

This has been Pattinson's year, with performances to relish in The Drama and The Odyssey (and Dune: Part Three still to come). But no film has suited his mischievously oddball style more than Primetime, a darkly surreal media satire which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday. The first narrative feature from Lance Oppenheim, previously a documentary director, Primetime is sure to be an Oscar contender – although it may be a controversial one.

The film is inspired by the true story of Chris Hansen, an Emmy-winning American journalist, and his most famous / notorious television show, To Catch a Predator, which ran as part of Dateline NBC from 2004 to 2007. The programme staged sting operations aimed at would-be paedophiles. Its staff would pose as minors in online conversations with adult men, and then arrange meetings with them. But when the men arrived at the houses of their imagined victims, the suave Hansen would stroll in, along with a camera crew, and ask them with devastating politeness what they were thinking.

Hansen himself wasn't involved in the making of Primetime, and has been critical of the film without having seen it. That hasn't stopped him taking advantage of it: he has paid for adverts to be shown before every US cinema screening, encouraging viewers to watch his own streaming service afterwards. But he probably won't love how he's portrayed.

The screenplay, by Ajon Singh, sees To Catch a Predator as marking the end of one TV era – Friends, the sitcom phenomenon, finished its 10-series run in 2004 – and the beginning of a grim new age of reality television. What, after all, could be grimmer than the exposure of sexual criminals being packaged as rip-roaring entertainment? The fictionalised Hansen is cock-a-hoop when his programme is moved to a mid-evening timeslot: it might be seen by more viewers than Lost, he crows.

But should he really be jumping for joy about trapping and humiliating people on television, however heinous they may be? And does he or his coolly ruthless producer (Merritt Wever) care about the programme's adult "decoys" (Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers), who have the disturbing job of pretending to be in their early teens?

There's nothing radical about the message of Primetime: alongside Ink, it's one of the two films at Venice lamenting the arrival of a new strain of media sensationalism. What makes it so intoxicating is that it's not a straightforward drama, but a heightened, hallucinatory black comedy. Rather than detailing Hansen's back story or the creation of To Catch a Predator, it drops us into the middle of a fever dream in which everything is wholly believable yet unsettlingly weird.

Pattinson embodies that dizzying tone. As in so many of his films, his performance in Primetime is exaggerated and theatrical without ever being arch. He is completely immersed in the character's strangeness. He plays Hansen as a slippery creep, sometimes buffoonish in his self-confidence and sometimes sinister, and sometimes on the verge of madness. Talking to the BBC in Venice yesterday, Oppenheim described Pattinson's version of Hansen as a cross between Jerry Maguire and Dracula.

The key could be that Pattinson never asks us to sympathise with the character. In fact, he seems happy for us to loathe him. But it's a pleasure to watch him, anyway. This is the best performance yet from the most intriguing actor of his generation.

★★★★★

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