“I will undress you, and you will undress me,” repeats Chris Hansen incessantly in Primetime. He speaks in a slow cadence, each syllable rolling heavily off his slithering tongue. As he mulls over these suggestive words, he stares at himself in the mirror, ever so slightly adjusting his grimace, his posture, and his suit.
A seasoned television presenter, Hansen is practicing. He contorts his thin lips and subtly adjusts his angles in the light as he circles around his own reflection. He wants the delivery to be perfect, instantly lethal. It’s meant to overpower his adversary and astonish his viewers. More than anything, it’s meant to ensure his show becomes a primetime sensation.
None of this would be shocking or even peculiar, were it not for the trifling matter of Hansen’s text being written by a pedophile. Hansen’s job, in fact, is to catch pedophiles on live television; his show, To Catch a Predator (a real-world series that ran in 2004-07), is an elaborate setup where paid actors pose as children, luring pedophiles to their staged “home” before Hansen swoops in like a vengeful angel to expose them and triumphantly hand them over to the police. The bad guys are locked up, the judicial system appeased, and Hansen’s team awarded skyrocketing viewership numbers and fat paychecks. You see how this looks, right?
Docu-director Lance Oppenheim’s feature debut, Primetime, uses Hansen’s real-life reality TV show to expose the many layers of sickness around it, not just that of pedophile predators. Starring a never-better Robert Pattinson (we say that for every one of his films, and every time it’s true) as Hansen, Primetime zeroes in on the production behind To Catch a Predator, showing that exhibitionism and pursuit of profit seldom intersect with the pursuit of justice.
It is 2006, and after another successful stint with his aide group, Perverted Justice, Hansen is on track to become a national sensation. NBC CEO Jeff Zucker (coyly dramatized by himself) doesn’t like Hansen, but he doesn’t have to—all that matters is that the audience does, and they seem to be eating him up. Hansen’s producer at the (real-world) news magazine and true-crime series Dateline NBC, Andie Bender (a fantastic Merritt Wever), is game and will push Hansen to the bitter end to secure the biggest slice of the viewing pie. To Catch a Predator is going to be bigger than J.J. Abrams’ LOST. Somebody will get those predators out of here, for sure.
Hansen is always focused on success, but now he must step up his game. He needs bigger props, better actors, stronger decoys, and badder predators. Thus, Del Harvey (a convincing Phoebe Bridgers in her first film role) and acting newcomer Dan Plumb (an excellent Skyler Gisondo) jump in as illegal-looking decoys, and Perverted Justice founder Xavier von Erck (a tenacious Matthew Maher) gets on with luring the predatory whale.
Of course, Hansen is no Captain Ahab, and his targets offer no biblical or Shakespearean allegories. Their roles have little complexity, moral or otherwise; they are all predators acting on a whim or, worse, compulsion. The pedophiles want to get to children, Plumb wants to become a movie star, and Bender wants to get to the No. 1 viewing spot. The Perverted Justice team are the only ones interested in the real victims, but they, too, support the cause wholeheartedly. Meanwhile, it’s not clear what Hansen wants besides good ratings. To be adored, respected, feared? Likely, but that falls squarely within the job description of any primetime TV presenter.
Regarding To Catch a Predator, the complexity of the worrisome real-life setup lies beyond the camera lens but also in the production stage, in the systemic failures that led to such a show being possible in the first place, and especially in the social anomie that allowed Jeffrey Epstein’s client list to remain secret to this day.
Somewhat surprisingly, Primetime sacrifices its enormous potential for narrative depth for all-consuming “vibes” and typical A24 fever-dream nihilism, doused in warped reflections and hues of blue. Its message is, aptly, in line with Lisa of The Simpsons: “the whole goddamn system is wrong”, but it’s another cynical view of the moral rot at the heart of (the US) society that nobody seems to give a damn about combating. Story-wise, Hansen is less a multifaceted product of his environment and his country’s history and more of a darkly comical parody of a TV presenter with a Messiah complex.
The likely reason is Ajon Singh’s script, based on the 2007 Esquire expose of Hansen, which centers on one colossal cockup in To Catch a Predator’s production that serves as Primetime’s culmination. Superbly researched but somewhat dry to read, the Esquire piece is clearly a reportage. As such, it cannot allow for tangential foci, instead going for the jugular with one main issue: Hansen’s team’s readiness to do anything for fame and money, including a vigilante appropriation of the institutional measures necessary to see any actual “justice” through.
Sadly, Singh’s screenplay doesn’t bother to offer much beyond what Esquire already reported. Aesthetically speaking, Primetime is filthy and compelling the way a car crash would be to a bystander, racing like a thriller to a morbid climax, but it doesn’t add anything to the moral debate on any of the big issues it blows up, be it pedophilia, reality television, or extrajudicial reckoning. Having in mind that David Osit’s excellent 2025 documentary, Predators, which did a deep dive into the To Catch a Predator credo, premiered merely a year ago, it’s not senseless to ask what Primetime actually brings to the cinematic table.
The answer is as straightforward as it will be satisfying for many viewers: it’s Pattinson’s insanely layered, hypnotic performance and a fresh, if unambiguous, layer of inquiry. From the ominous opening sequence, it is clear why the 40-year-old Brit served as Primetime’s producer, scrambling to get the film done. He knew it would be another showcase for his astounding shapeshifting capabilities (not to mention another Pattinson exercise in the world’s most bizarre accents).
What Pattinson and his Hansen lack in Primetime’s script, he more than makes up for with Oppenheim’s generous help. At 30, the Harvard graduate and author of the beloved 2020 documentary Some Kind of Heaven has plenty of time to hone his insight into the underbelly of North American society, but his vision is already laser-focused. He uses Primetime’s actual crew as a backdrop for the film’s fictional production sets, shifting cameras, angles, and techniques (some digital shots were uploaded to 16 mm for a “vintage” look). The line between artifice and ingenuity, reality and fiction, continues to blur until the very end.
The documentary feel of Primetime is no coincidence; with it, Oppenheim steps back and uses Hansen as a vessel to turn the gaze toward the audience. He shows that it’s not only pedophilic predators we ought to be reckoning here. The layering of documentaristic atop fictional atop documentaristic purposefully elicits affective confusion. It’s meant to ask what the hell we remember when we think back to watching reality television, and especially programming such as To Catch a Predator. The show didn’t reach its primetime slot on its own. It’s only fair we pause to think about who made it so popular (and why) before it ultimately imploded.
Still, the elaborate stylistic arrangement would not hit nearly as strongly without Pattinson’s mephistophelean magic. Despite doing a biographical performance, he treats Hansen not as a person, the slightly buffoonish, even relatively likeable hotshot he is, but as a costume, an empty suit to be filled with all the traits that could will something as ominous as To Catch a Predator into existence. Delivering an uncanny resemblance to Hansen’s own mannerisms and his idiosyncratic, eerily recognizable prosody, Pattinson remains pitch-perfect as he oscillates between naive and sinister, idealistic and cynical, righteous and wicked.
Oppenheim’s strength in evocatively merging the artificial with the uncanny, and Pattinson’s restrained yet entirely unpredictable performance, drive Primetime’s point home elegantly, amplifying its effect. The rhythm of a thriller adds to the discomfort of seeing what goes on from both sides of the show’s voyeuristic camera. Too bad that such a cynical setup with no honest characters cannot yield an honest payoff. The loop of despicable characters made to suffer by other despicable characters is, in this case, tied up too tightly to allow room for genuine reflection. There is a crack in everything, but in Primetime, that’s not where the light gets in. Rather, it’s where the pus oozes from.
Ultimately, Primetime is a deftly put-together, fascinatingly acted slick watch that forgets how deeply its source material penetrates our norms and mores. If its legacy is Pattinson’s generational performance and an uncomfortable stare into viewers’ psyches as the apex predators of our times, that still makes it worthwhile.