Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime understands that the most disturbing thing about To Catch a Predator was never necessarily what happened when Chris Hansen stepped out from behind that curtain. It was how effortlessly something ostensibly created in the name of public safety became entertainment; how quickly justice could be packaged, promoted and sold to an audience hungry to watch someone else’s worst moment unfold. In dramatizing the rise of the controversial NBC series, Oppenheim has crafted a gripping, darkly funny psychological thriller that feels less interested in recreating television history than examining the appetite that allowed it to thrive.
Robert Pattinson plays Hansen at the height of the show’s cultural power, as To Catch a Predator graduates to primetime and the pressure to deliver something bigger, uglier and more sensational intensifies. Pattinson has already enjoyed a remarkable year between The Drama and The Odyssey, but he may have never been better than he is here. His Hansen is simultaneously magnetic and repellent: a man who has become so convinced of his own righteousness that fame, justice and personal validation have seemingly become indistinguishable.
It would have been easy for Pattinson to reduce Hansen to an impersonation, especially given the recognisable voice and mannerisms, but his performance is far stranger and more interesting than mimicry. He captures the confidence of someone who knows exactly where the camera is at all times, while allowing flashes of insecurity and desperation to puncture that carefully constructed persona. Hansen can command a room, sell himself as a crusader and project absolute certainty, yet Pattinson continually suggests a man terrified that the attention might disappear. As pressure surrounding the program and his personal life mounts, that contradiction becomes increasingly unsettling.
Oppenheim, making his narrative feature debut after documentaries including Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, brings a documentarian’s fascination with uncomfortable human behaviour to the material. He and cinematographer David Bolen recreate the grubby visual language of mid-2000s television through surveillance footage, smeared textures, oppressive close-ups and lurid lighting, gradually transforming the film into something approaching psychological horror. The distinction between the show being made and the movie we’re watching becomes deliberately slippery, forcing us to consider our own participation in the spectacle.
Crucially, Primetime doesn’t belong to Pattinson alone. Skyler Gisondo and Merritt Wever are every bit as deserving of attention. Gisondo is terrific as Dan Plumb, an aspiring actor hired as a decoy whose excitement at finally getting a break gradually collides with the disturbing reality of what the job requires. Gisondo’s natural warmth is beautifully weaponised here. Dan wants to impress, wants more screen time and wants to believe that what they are doing matters, making his gradual discomfort one of the film’s most affecting elements.
Wever is equally superb as producer Andie Bender, delivering perhaps the film’s quietest performance and one of its most fascinating. She understands both television and people, possessing the unnerving ability to determine what somebody needs to hear in order to keep the machinery moving. Where Pattinson’s Hansen increasingly performs his power, Wever barely needs to announce hers. Her restraint provides a compelling counterweight to Pattinson’s theatricality, and the film becomes richer whenever the two occupy the same space.
Ajon Singh’s screenplay also has considerable fun placing To Catch a Predator within the broader cultural insanity of the mid-2000s, when reality television was becoming increasingly shameless and network programming was desperate to manufacture the next phenomenon. The darker joke running through Primetime is that everyone can justify what they’re doing because audiences keep watching. Ratings become validation, validation becomes morality, and morality becomes whatever makes compelling television.
That tension gives Oppenheim’s film its bite. Primetime is slick, funny, uncomfortable and enormously entertaining, but the entertainment itself is part of the provocation. It asks what happens when journalism begins performing for an audience rather than informing one, and how easily righteous intentions can become corrupted once cameras, celebrity and ratings enter the equation.
Pattinson is extraordinary, pushing his willingness to embrace strange, abrasive characters into fascinating new territory, but Primetime is ultimately strengthened by refusing to make him its sole attraction. Gisondo gives the film its bruised humanity, Wever its unnerving intelligence, and Oppenheim surrounds all three with an atmosphere of mounting dread. The result is an engrossing examination of sensationalism that knows exactly how seductive the spectacle can be – because for nearly two hours, it makes it almost impossible to look away.
FOUR AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Primetime is screening in North American theatres from September 25th, 2026, before opening in Australia on October 29th.
