Robert Pattinson reciting a predator’s chat log like Shakespeare is funnier than it should be. It is also the first warning that Lance Oppenheim has no interest in treating Chris Hansen as a neutral historical figure. Under red light, surrounded by shadow and degraded mini-DV grain, Hansen rehearses sexually explicit lines until their ugliness acquires the polish of broadcast copy. He is practicing disgust.
Primetime, Oppenheim’s fiction feature debut, takes the rise and collapse of To Catch a Predator and turns it into a media nightmare about people who discover that righteousness performs exceptionally well on television. Ajon Singh’s screenplay, inspired by Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article about the program’s disastrous final chapter, places the action in 2006, when network ratings could still turn a segment into a national ritual.
The film’s Hansen believes television has inherited the function of the public pillory. His job, as he sees it, is to drag predators into the light. Pattinson plays him with the unmistakable cadence, square-jawed composure, and mildly alien confidence of someone who has spent too long hearing his own voice through an earpiece. The problem is that Hansen loves the light. That distinction fuels the film. Public safety may have brought the cameras into the house. Soon enough, the cameras become the reason everyone stays.
Bigger Than Lost
The mechanics of the sting are initially presented with clinical precision. Online operators pose as minors. Adult decoys wait inside suburban homes. Hidden cameras watch from corners. Once a suspect arrives, Hansen enters with printed transcripts and asks the familiar question: “You see how this looks, right?” It looks terrific on television.
The first major sting, involving Tony Revolori as a former Marine, shows Oppenheim’s documentary instincts at their sharpest. Del, played by Phoebe Bridgers with dry calm, moves through the setup like an actor who has memorized every contingency. Producer Andie Bender, played by Merritt Wever, arranges bodies and cameras with quiet authority. Crew members hover just outside sightlines. The suspect thinks he has entered one story. The television team knows he has entered another.
There is genuine public-interest value somewhere inside this operation. The film never pretends otherwise. Its interest lies in watching that value mutate once NBC moves the program into primetime opposite ABC’s Lost. The promotion changes the unit of measurement. Success can no longer mean exposing a dangerous man. Success means beating polar bears and island mysteries.
Hansen’s drunken insistence that they will become “bigger than Lost” is where civic language gives way to ratings language with almost comic efficiency. Soon the team needs bigger targets. Ordinary offenders stop being sufficient. Hansen wants a “whale,” preferably someone with institutional power whose exposure can be sold as a national event. Call this moral escalation syndrome: when a righteous project succeeds so completely that it must keep manufacturing larger versions of the evil it claims to oppose.
Jeff Zucker appearing as himself sharpens the joke without making it subtle. Executives demand escalation, Hansen provides it, and everyone retains enough ethical vocabulary to pretend they are discussing journalism.
The hunt eventually leads to Murphy, Texas, where district attorney Bill Conradt becomes the prized target. By then the sting has expanded beyond its normal process. Communication breaks down. Local law enforcement becomes deeply involved. The crew keeps moving because stopping would mean admitting the story no longer fits the format. Television hates an unusable ending.
Hansen and His Apprentice
Pattinson’s interpretation of Hansen is intentionally extreme. He captures the famous delivery, yet vocal impersonation is the least interesting part of the performance. Watch him whenever another person threatens the integrity of his self-image. His shoulders tighten. His face becomes slightly too still. Then the broadcaster returns, smoothing panic back into presentation.
His private life follows the same logic. Hansen barely engages with his family unless the show is involved. When his wife, played briefly by Anna Faris, confronts him about his failures, he drops to his knees and confesses. The gesture should register as humiliation. Pattinson makes it resemble an audition for humility.
A smaller scene cuts deeper. Hansen searches the National Enquirer website after fearing that his affair will become public. His name produces nothing. Relief appears first. Disappointment follows. There it is.
The film occasionally works too hard to explain Hansen through elaborate psychological material, including imagined symbolism connected to his earlier reporting on murdered children in India. I understand the intention. I am less convinced it helps. The man staring at an empty search result already tells us almost everything. Hansen fears disgrace, yet invisibility frightens him too. Skyler Gisondo’s Dan Plum gives the film a subtler version of the same disease.
Dan arrives as an aspiring actor who accepts decoy work partly because it may help him obtain his SAG card. He trains himself to pass as a 13-year-old, adjusting his voice and physicality with genuine professional concentration. His employers reduce this odd talent to a market category, describing his youthful appearance as his “lane.” Then he actually meets the job.
During an early sting, a suspect arrives carrying whipped cream and expecting sex with a child. Dan’s revulsion is immediate. The imagined acting opportunity collapses into something physical and ugly. Yet the sting succeeds, an arrest follows, and the production gives him a language capable of absorbing the trauma. He helped stop evil. He mattered.
Hansen becomes a warped mentor. He assures Dan that their work cleanses society, and Dan slowly learns to interpret his discomfort as proof that the work is meaningful. He grows better at the role. Pride replaces shock. Performance starts eating belief from the inside.
Gisondo is superb in those transitions. Dan never becomes a miniature Hansen through a single revelation. He gets there through compliments, professional validation, successful stings, and the seductive pleasure of being useful. That is how institutions recruit people into moral compromise. Usually there is paperwork.
Television Static Turned Into Horror
David Bolen’s cinematography makes the movie look infected by its own subject. Mini-DV footage, hidden-camera compositions, CCTV grids, television screens, digital photography, and analogue textures keep colliding until there is no stable visual reality left.
The sting footage carries the ugliness of early-2000s broadcast video. Faces flatten under practical lighting. Rooms look cheap. Surveillance angles turn human beings into specimens. Away from the television setup, Bolen lets the image become lush, saturated, and strangely seductive.
The motel sequence is a useful example. Alex DiGerlando’s production design gives Bolen an ordinary anonymous room, the sort of place cinema has photographed ten thousand times. Heightened light and sickly color turn it into something almost luxurious. The effect should be contradictory. It is. Oppenheim is criticizing spectacle through spectacular filmmaking. I initially thought this weakened the argument. Then the movie kept doing it. The contradiction is the argument.
Primetime wants viewers to enjoy the same mechanisms it distrusts. Daniel Garber’s editing becomes especially aggressive during the Texas operation, cutting through online messages, camera preparations, police movement, Hansen’s panic, and the crew’s shifting plans. Information arrives faster than anyone can ethically process it.
Ari Balouzian’s score pushes this material toward poisoned fairytale territory. Children’s chimes appear where innocence should be absent. Electronic glitches and static break through scenes. Paul Hsu folds dial-up noises and feedback into the soundscape until obsolete technology starts carrying menace.
The film gradually makes early digital culture feel haunted. Chatrooms, hidden cameras, cheap monitors, and clumsy video feeds become artifacts from a period when Americans were discovering that surveillance could be consumed recreationally. The cameras are supposedly documenting danger. By the final act, they seem hungry for it.
Who Is Grooming Whom?
Hansen repeatedly confronts suspects with a question: what would have happened if he had not been there? It is meant rhetorically. Primetime refuses to leave it that way. Some of the men arrive with plainly horrific intentions. The film does not soften them. Yet the production is also extending conversations, designing situations, selecting targets, and increasing the intensity of its operations because stronger footage means stronger television.
This creates the film’s most uncomfortable idea. A system built to expose predation begins adopting the behavioral grammar of seduction. Online operators lure suspects. Producers lure Dan with professional opportunity. Hansen lures himself with celebrity. Network executives lure the production with ratings. The show lures viewers with the promise that watching humiliation counts as moral participation.
Andie occupies the ugliest position because she can see the machinery working. Wever’s incessant gum chewing becomes part of the performance, a small physical rhythm accompanying decisions delivered in a calm voice. She rarely needs to raise it. She can package exploitation as logistical necessity.
Matthew Maher’s Xavier is even slipperier. His enthusiasm for hunting predators carries enough personal excitement to blur the boundary between mission and obsession. Bridgers’ Del appears steadier because she understands the role as a role, which may explain why Dan is so vulnerable. He wants it to mean something.
The film occasionally simplifies its own case. Hansen arrives close to full grotesquerie, which leaves Pattinson limited room for transformation. The marital-affair material spends time proving selfishness that his professional behavior has already demonstrated with greater force. The Indian imagery presses toward psychological explanation when his appetite for attention is both simpler and stranger.
Dan carries the richer ambiguity. Watching him metabolize horror into professional pride shows how people can enter harmful systems without believing themselves harmful. No cartoon villainy is required. Give someone a job, a cause, a mentor, and applause. Then give them an audience.
Oppenheim’s nastiest move is making all of this pleasurable to watch. The stings have rhythm. The hunt has suspense. Pattinson is funny. Gisondo is heartbreaking. Bolen’s images glow. The television crew grows morally sicker while the movie becomes increasingly exciting. Maybe that is hypocrisy. I thought so for a while. It may be closer to evidence.
Primetime premiered in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 5, 2026, ahead of an upcoming theatrical release by A24. The psychological crime drama follows a television journalist obsessed with the ratings success of a controversial investigative sting operation.
Where to Watch Primetime (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Primetime
Distributor: A24
Release date: September 5, 2026 (Venice International Film Festival)
Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes
Director: Lance Oppenheim
Writers: Ajon Singh
Producers and Executive Producers: Robert Pattinson, Ari Aster, Fred Berger, Lars Knudsen
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Matthew Maher, Bokeem Woodbine, Anna Faris, Tony Revolori
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): David Bolen
Editors: Daniel Garber
Composer: Ari Balouzian
The Review
Primetime
Primetime turns Chris Hansen into the logical endpoint of television that confuses visibility with virtue. Robert Pattinson makes Hansen’s rehearsed righteousness increasingly grotesque, while Skyler Gisondo gives the film its most complicated human fracture. Lance Oppenheim’s feverish DV imagery, surveillance framing, and corrupted broadcast textures make watching feel uncomfortably pleasurable. The affair subplot and overt psychological symbolism occasionally reduce a sharper argument about ratings, humiliation, and spectatorship. The nastiest question survives: if public punishment became entertainment because audiences demanded it, exactly who was exploiting whom?
PROS
- Pattinson’s ferocious Hansen
- Gisondo’s layered Dan Plum
- Diseased broadcast aesthetic
- Strong ensemble performances
- Sharp critique of televised humiliation
CONS
- Hansen begins near maximum grotesquerie
- Affair subplot lacks depth
- Dan deserved greater narrative weight
- Some symbolism feels overworked
