R Patz may not have hit the five films in 2026 milestone that A Hath has, but his third film out of four this year might just be his best 2026 performance so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Some films favour an opening monologue, whether that takes the form of spoken word or a barrage of on-screen text to set the scene. Maybe even both. But Primetime? Not so much. You do get speech, sure, and you also get images on the screen, but the words you\u2019re hearing are emanating from an unseen source, and what\u2019s appearing on the black screen is just a series of film distribution companies. You know the actor who\u2019s saying the words, because his face is plastered all over the promotional posters, but still, you don\u2019t actually see the main man straight away. As the rehearsal lines of Chris Hansen (played with typical aplomb by Robert Pattinson) start to occur in the soundscape multiple times across the film, they become familiar. Not a comfortable kind of familiar, but a kind of unsettling sonic motif to let you know that the main man\u2019s still in control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Watching is on display from the start. Characters watch other characters from the safety of TV screens while we the audience are also watching this voyeurism take place. It\u2019s a transparent filming style that director Lance Oppenheim employs very effectively. But it\u2019s voices, or rather the pitches and tones of the voices, which are really the stars of the show. When you\u2019re thrown into a film that doesn\u2019t provide you with easy opening explanations, you have to rely on the less expository stuff. And while there\u2019s plenty of dialogue spoken by the main characters, it\u2019s how they say it, the form, that really opens up the intrigue rather than the content. We know that our main character\u2019s a scumbag before we start watching, however much the film is or isn\u2019t going to try to glamorise him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it\u2019s how he wields vocals as a weapon to make the audience engaged. Pattinson unsurprisingly put in the effort \u2013 and the Method – to mirror the real-life Hansen\u2019s tones. Beyond listening to Hansen\u2019s podcast around 100 times and reciting lines as he listened (adding an extra kind of level to the lines we listen to Pattinson \u2013 as Hansen \u2013 rehearsing in the film), he went to that next step of staying in character off-camera to keep the complexity of Hansen\u2019s complex vocal tones as authentic as possible. There\u2019s a great sequence where Pattinson\u2019s doing some particular vigorous work with his jaw while listening to a phone call, with Oppenheim noting the transformation in the actor\u2019s facial movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vocal performances don\u2019t stop there, though. Merritt Wever delivers a powerhouse performance as Hansen\u2019s producer Andie Bender just based on pitch alone. If voices were violins, hers would be a particularly sonorous one, particularly as she coerces na\u00efve actor Dan Plum (later nicknamed by Hansen as Decoy Dan, also adept with his vocal intonations) into joining the immoral crew. There doesn\u2019t seem to much online about their voice preparations, but they\u2019re equally impressive. All of these voices become an orchestra of sound that make the main three trio stand out. There\u2019s no voiceover to politely push the viewer along for the ride. It\u2019s these sounds, and the dedication to their vocal quality, that elevates Primetime into a compelling and uncomfortable sphere of sonic spectacle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
R Patz may not have hit the five films in 2026 milestone that A Hath has, but his third film out of four this year might just be his best 2026 performance so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2121,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2120\/revisions\/2121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyepton.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}