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.

Last fall, David Osit's level-headed documentary "Predators" examined the ethics of a show that primarily snared people who'd never before acted on their terrible urges. Oppenheim comes from the documentary world, too (including the upcoming Elizabeth Holmes film "You Can See Everything" co-directed by Nathan Fielder), but sprints headlong in the opposite direction, shooting his first narrative feature like a waking nightmare. He doesn't grapple with the mess so much as fingerpaint it onto the screen with thick black shadows and a tone of tawdry filth. Cinematographer David Bolen engulfs us in all the ick of the original show with neither commercial breaks nor catharsis.

The script, by Ajon Singh, is about the urgency to beat "Lost" in the ratings. "Dateline's" boss, network executive Jeff Zucker daringly playing himself (I suppose it's better to be in on the joke than not), pressures Hansen, along with "To Catch a Predator's" head of sting operations Xavier (Matthew Maher) and producer Andie (a scarily composed Merritt Wever), to entrap juicier suspects than the usual roundup of sad, broken men. He wants "the best of the best" — as in, the worst of the worst — and so the team goes hunting for goons with the potential to go viral, like the one who types that he wants to "f— a cat."

Xavier, a vile keyboard warrior, thinks he might have hooked a politician in rural Murphy, Texas. The show is supposed to head to New Jersey for something else. Instead, it emergency pivots to Texas and winds up airing a death. "Primetime" doesn't goose much tension out of the pending disaster, perhaps assuming that we already know what happened. Or perhaps it tries to, but we can't hear any suspense when the whole film is delivered at a scream.

The film meticulously makes one argument over and over: Everyone is an exploitative creep. Each scene is about secrets, hypocrisy or some form of seduction. Xavier is a porn addict. Andie gets lured into a lunch date with a rival executive who tries to woo her over to ABC. Hansen is snared in a sex scandal of his own with the National Enquirer photographing him cheating on his wife, Mary (Anna Faris). When he promises her that he'll straighten out his life, he sounds as desperate as all the other bad men who've tried those same pleas on him.

There's not a single shot of a healthy human being in the movie, only wraiths filmed in sickly shades of pink, red and blue. Even the actor decoys, Del (musician Phoebe Bridgers) and Dan (Skyler Gisondo), hired to greet the men and tempt them toward the hidden cameras, are at risk of corruption. Del, who's been with the program the longest, can shape-shift from teen girl to teen boy as required. She sees her on-air work as righteous combat, slipping on a camo hat when she skips onto the set, only to then barge in on her own colleagues when they're naked. Meanwhile, Gisondo's freckle-faced Dan is the only truly heartbreaking character. A rube who wants to be making musical theater, Dan is just hoping to earn a SAG card. On his first shoot, Andie drugs her nervous new hire with a mystery pill, then tells Hansen to take him out for drinks. The show needs Dan's willing young flesh.

Structurally, the film is all choppy shock scenes, like the program itself. I left annoyed by the overall movie, yet haunted by a half-dozen of its images: Andie vacuuming the decoy house before the next shoot, a woman in the workplace handling an overlooked job. A cop (Bokeem Woodbine) ordering a sandwich under the eyes of disgraced Subway spokesman Jared Fogle. Workaholic Hansen tugging his own small children out of bed to watch their daddy talk sex crimes on TV, then heading back to the set to play catch with Decoy Dan between takes.

"Primetime" doesn't hold together as a movie, but there's thought behind its choices. This rural Texas police department has, for no reason at all, a battle tank, evidence that surge in money and weaponry in the wake of 9/11 has these cops too excited to finally see some action. Likewise, you hear an echo of President George W. Bush's tough talk when Hansen tells Dan that he's either with him or the pedophiles.

There's bleak humor in casting iconic child actor Jonathan Lipnicki of "Jerry Maguire" as a would-be abuser who immediately drops his pants and sprays his crotch with whipped cream. Kudos to every actor who agreed to tackle these damaged men, from Bob Ari as an imperious rabbi to Tony Revolori as a pitiful moron, to Alex Winter as an upstanding citizen who's smart enough to suspect his urges are about to ruin his life. In one silent detail, Winter puts his laptop in the microwave, planning to destroy his cravings before he types the wrong thing. But the compulsion is too strong. He takes it back it out.

Pattinson throws his whole being into embodying the ringmaster rapidly losing control of his circus. Some of his performance is recognizably Hansen: the stern mouth, the snarky catchphrases, the swoop of blond bangs. Yet, Pattinson is so exaggerated, so commedia dell'awful, that if the real Chris Hansen doesn't sue, it'll be because he's calculated that no one would seriously believe this is him. "To Catch a Predator" drained some of the humanity from TV. Now "Primetime" drains the humanity from him. What's left behind is pure ego monster.

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'PRIMETIME'

MPA rating: R (for disturbing sexual material, graphic nudity, some violent content, and language)

Running time: 1:50

How to watch: In theaters Sept. 25

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