“An unnerving, icky descent into liminal madness.”
September 25, 2026
“You see how this looks, right?”
The images of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime are dizzying, haunting, and striking. They thrum with the seedy glow of early 2000s media culture, where the rise of the Internet and vigilante-style entertainment became a blueprint for understanding punitive justice today. One look at Netflix’s programming will show that audiences have an insatiable appetite for true crime. To Catch a Predator, the NBC television show hosted by Chris Hansen, exploited this hunger well before the binge watch era. Primetime focuses on how Hansen turned justice into a spectacle for primetime viewers, framing houses of decoys to lure and expose predators on camera. Through the lens of a psychological thriller, Hansen’s pursuit of justice bleeds into his chase for ratings. The film deftly explores this subject with a dizzying minute account of Hansen’s distorted reality. It’s an unnerving, icky descent into liminal madness. Most impressively, it stays in the fever dream of grappling with an inscrutable subject.
Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, a journalist on a bleak search to make television history while caught in a performative web of his own hubris. Set across the United States in 2006, during peak success for To Catch a Predator, the film dissects a series of undercover sting operations that squirm under the weight of network expectations. Hansen has just been anointed the coveted primetime slot, putting him in direct competition with the television show Lost. To compete with ratings, Chris relies on his dysfunctional production team, including head producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) and tech vigilante Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), promising increasingly elusive targets. Andie oversees the staging and scheduling, keeping everyone on the move and according to plan. Xavier, founder of the online watchdog group Perverted Justice, poses as a minor to identify sexual predators in chat rooms and lure them to visit the minors’ heavily surveilled “homes”. Seasoned adult decoy Del Harvey (Phoebe Bridgers in her feature film debut) and newly hired decoy Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) pose as children in front of hidden cameras. Meanwhile, Hansen stands waiting in the shrouded wings, analyzing the prime time to step onto his manipulated stage.
The tension between serious journalist and strange persona dominates most of Primetime’s first half, which sees Hansen driven by a chip on his shoulder. He knows that To Catch a Predator is a spectacle for entertainment, but also wants the respect of a prestige news anchor like Stone Phillips (played by Bill Heck in a brief appearance). The screenplay, written by Ajon Singh and based on Luke Dittrich’s Esquire article Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, makes compelling use of this tension. Hansen dedicates every waking minute to staging punitive justice for an audience. He constantly recites lines and performs in front of a mirror, chasing the idea that whoever has the most enticing story wins the ratings war. And this haunted world, in which punishment and entertainment are synonymous, consumes his production entirely.
Oppenheim’s background as a documentarian lends to this subject matter, as he blends reality and creative freedom to make something truly stranger than fiction. The visual cues between what makes a documentary versus a narrative feature bleed together. Oppenheim leans into the heightened reality of To Catch a Predator, evoking the same feeling of watching the show itself. Aided by the work of cinematographer David Bolen, the film captures a distinctive texture from the fuzzy VHS tape era. Ari Balouzian’s brilliant score serves up a sickly soundtrack to Hansen’s network nightmare. And the film is underscored by oversaturated, lurid shades of blue that recreate an early 2000s trash TV atmosphere. Bolen and Oppenheim get experimental in the grimy visual language. They excel at observing the story from different points of view, using hidden cameras and retro house designs that feel stuck in time. And the muted pastels of those houses echo satire like To Die For, and its constructed reality within a television landscape.
Easily one of the most electric actors of his generation, Pattinson brilliantly depicts a nightmarish, old-school news anchor version of Hansen. He taints the screen with hideous ambition and full-blown narcissism. There is no particular insight on Hansen behind closed doors. A subplot involving his marital affair attempts at digging into a broken family image, but falls flat in hollowness. There is no epiphany arc, nor an introspective character study. Everything he does is part of a show, and Pattinson leans into this showmanship to an unnerving degree. He digs into the television persona to expose an ugly abyss of a person whose entire world becomes a gamble on the show’s success. This makes his work all the more visceral and unpredictable.
Anticipating a new Pattinson performance also comes with wondering what new voice he’ll spring onto us. In Primetime, he nails Hansen’s distinctive cadence, coupled with a shape-shifting physicality. He uses every tool in the box to embody a carefully cultivated persona, including his body language. In a standout scene, Pattinson stands in front of the mirror and performs a dramatic spit take. He leans into the caricature, the mythology and memeification of Hansen’s cultural legacy, which makes for a reflection of uncomfortable absurdity. It also makes the film’s tacking of the subject matter feel somewhat muddled.
Oppenheim excels at dark psychological satire until losing his grip in the film’s second half, when a high-risk operation turns fatal. Undermining the authority of Andie, the production team relocate to Texas upon discovering they might catch “The Whale,” later revealed to be District Attorney Bill Conradt (played by Alex Winter). The sting operation tumbles Hansen’s house of cards and reveals an absurd, flimsy foundation beneath. Hansen’s work stems from the belief that he is cleansing the world of an ancient evil, drawn from his witnessing of child murders in India. This surreal turn steers Primetime on a heavy-handed path of exploring Hansen’s psychological drama. It creates more ambiguity when it could have zoned in on his complicity, seeing as we’re watching in horror how the serious subject matter collides with audiences’ appetite for more.
The film mines compelling storytelling from behind-the-scenes of Hansen’s sting operations, which becomes a second home for the production team. There’s plenty to gather from how these individuals reach their decisions and navigate increasingly disturbing scenarios. Merritt Wever steals the show with a sensational performance as Andie, the producer who has devoted her entire life to building this seedy world. She represents an ongoing compulsion to find the profitability and entertainment value in something so perverse. The devil is in the details, from her calling Decoy Dan a star, to her line reading of “That’s gorgeous” in response to a disturbing development caught on camera. In a pivotal moment between Hansen, when she screams at him to get his shit together, it’s a masterclass of Wever’s timing and tension. And it’s a mirror to her desperation for power and control, despite the red flags. She brings a haunted spirit to the role, carrying the emotional toll of what the show has cost her. This toll almost reaches a crisis when Andie is recruited to join the production of What Would You Do?, an ABC television show hosted by John Quiñones. It’s a very well-constructed scene that clues you into the cultural obsession with surveillance, and the many hidden camera-based shows of this era.
Dan Plum, nicknamed “Decoy Dan,” underscores the thematic weight of Primetime. There’s a compelling parallel between Dan’s clear ambitions as an actor, and Hansen’s insistence on not being an actor. When Dan gets the decoy role on To Catch a Predator, he is thrown onto the set without any protection, and witnesses a distressing incident caught on camera. He has a painful moment of vulnerability, which continues to haunt the character moving forward. Skyler Gisondo delivers a knockout performance, bringing a boyish quality and naïveté, along with an unwavering ambition that leads Dan on a strange path. When he features more heavily in the film’s second half, he stands out as a reminder of morality in this sordid world. He holds onto his love for acting, and musical theatre in particular, which manifests on a truly unsettling note in the final act. In that moment, he becomes an effective POV for how justice and entertainment collide, with his singing layered onto imminent doom.
While the messaging of Primetime gets lost in weak signals during the second half, there’s a reverberating through line that the film consistently finds its way back to: performance. When in performance mode, what happens to your work as a journalist? As an actor? As a human being? How does the illusion of anonymity shape the way you relate to your surroundings? Primetime is a harrowing reminder that today’s depraved online culture is not without precedent. Today, we continue to contort serious subject matter into shapes of profitability, feeding directly into the audiences’ appetite for more.
