Primetime (2026)
Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen with frosted tips and a voice that never leaves the air, even when the cameras have stopped and nobody remains to impress. It is a committed, slightly eerie piece of work. It deserves a better film than Primetime.
The setting is the mid-2000s, when Hansen fronted To Catch a Predator on Dateline NBC. Volunteers posed online as children, men turned up at a staged house, and young adult decoys met them while the cameras waited inside. Hansen wants bigger numbers. Director Lance Oppenheim, in his first narrative feature, and writer Ajon Singh follow that hunger while ABC’s Lost looms over the ratings. Merritt Wever plays his producer, Andie Bender, Skyler Gisondo is the decoy Dan Plumb, and Matthew Maher is Xavier Von Erck, founder of the group Perverted-Justice.
My trouble began with the pace. Attention gets divided among four people; none receives a line of development strong enough to pull me through the running time, and the film never settles whose story it is telling. Scenes make their small point and leave. The grainy, boxy look of 2000s television is handsome for a while, then it becomes wallpaper. Oppenheim mixes deadpan comedy with horror-movie shocks, which sounds lively on paper; on screen the two tones cancel each other, and the dread never sticks. Pattinson’s Hansen lurches between a performer who lives for the red light and a man haunted by his own fading relevance, and the film cannot decide whether I should laugh at him or fear him. I kept waiting for pressure to build inside that staged house, and it kept slackening instead.
The slackness would matter less if the film pressed its ideas hard. This is a story with real moral weight: a network sold public service while recruiting adults who looked young, a producer leaned on police to act, and shame became a ratings product. Where does journalism end and entrapment begin, and who answers for it when a man’s worst moment turns into programming? What did the decoys carry home afterwards? The film raises each question and drops it, usually for a joke or a mood. Its settled position appears to be that television is corrupt, which takes no courage and teaches me nothing. A film about a man who turned the public square into a television set could have turned the question on the audience, on our own appetite for watching men get caught. It never dares. No character is condemned, none is defended, and I left holding questions the film was too busy being stylish to answer.
The pleasures are small. Gisondo lets fear cross Dan’s face and then shows the job turning routine, which is the most honest moral accounting in the picture. Phoebe Bridgers, in her first screen role, steals several scenes as another decoy, Del. Wever is sharp as a producer who is good at the work and hooked on the rush. These performers find the human cost in a few looks. Dan is the figure who seems to carry the consequences of the project, and I wanted the film to stay with him when the sting was over instead of hurrying back to Hansen’s ambitions.
Pattinson completists, and anyone curious about how the original series was made, will find the performance worth their time. Anyone hoping for a hard look at what that programme did to people will leave hungry.