Primetime (2026 | USA | 110 minutes | Lance Oppenheim)
Last year’s Sundance Film Festival saw the premiere of Predators, David Osit’s surprisingly reflective documentary about the history and legacy of Chris Hansen’s salacious Dateline sting operation. Although short-lived, the show had outlived its influence, playing like a prank show for sex pests at the vanguard of a rapidly changing television landscape. The soon-familiar structure found each episode with a potential sex offender having been lured to the house via the then-nascent internet to meet an underaged “decoy” only to be confronted by a righteous reporter, interviewed on camera, and then tackled to the ground by local law enforcement. The combination of shocking disgust at these creeps followed by the reliable shaming and humiliation made for massive viewership.
This year, documentarian Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld) makes the leap to docudrama thriller to bring audiences inside the grimy operation behind To Catch a Predator. With Predators so fresh in mind, I was very curious to see what was left on the table for Oppenheim to accomplish via a scripted narrative that couldn’t be captured by traditional documentary. His involvement as Nathan Fielder’s co-director for You Can See Everything, the electrifying new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, strongly suggests that he sees a fertile path forward in the revelatory possibility of the blurred lines enabled by dramatic storytelling. (For what it’s worth, pseudo-documentary Pavements and interview re-enactment Peter Hujar’s Day were among my favorite films of last year, so I am very much game for some fuzzy lines.)
Where Osit’s documentary took a broad view of deep, multifaceted empathy, Oppenheim’s Primetime‘s chief selling point is the sheer magnetism of Robert Pattinson’s slippery screen presence as Chris Hansen. Like so many of his roles, it’s a big and tricky performance whose gambit pays massive dividends. I was left with some doubts about the movie as a whole, but the relentlessly fascinating ways Pattinson inhabits this very strange character are worth the price of admission.
The film opens inside a classic sting operation. Cinematographer David Bolen (who has lensed Oppenheim’s other docs as well as the utterly delightful Thelma) transports us to the look and feel of early 2000s life. The aspect ratio is blocky, the digital video is a bit grimy, and the home used as a staging ground is cavernously beige and typically under-furnished. There’s an incongruous island in the living room and the trademark plate of cookies awaiting the perp. Once the pathetic guy makes his way across the shaggy brown carpet to meet the “kid” he’s been trying to seduce online (played by recording artist Phoebe Bridgers in her film debut), Pattinson’s version of Chris Hansen emerges, trenchcoat clad, from behind the curtains at the top of the open stairwell. The way he swoops down from his perch to reign shame upon the pathetic little man (Tony Revolori) reminds you that this is a man who’s played Batman.
Over the ensuing episodes, we come to meet two other key players in a triad of ambition and complicity that would fuel the show’s success. The first is Andie (an excellent Merritt Wever), a beleaguered composite of one of Hansen’s on-site producers, whose competence makes the whole predator-hunting operation run and who thrills at exercising the swift moral flexibility to find a compelling edit in any amount of chaos. The other is Dan Plum (a giddily eager Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring actor whom we first meet via a cringey audition tape that has him singing a pitchy a cappella rendition of “Seasons of Love” from Rent. He seemingly gets the job on the basis of being heavily freckled, looking young enough to lure a pedophile, and being hungry enough for credits that he doesn’t mind turning up the sassy high-pitched voice for the part. No one as impressed by a Fort Myers motel coffee maker would ever turn down chance after chance for national television exposure.
Pattinson, though, is the main attraction, and the film isn’t really sure what to do with anyone else. His rendering of Hansen is of a man whose outsized self-esteem, conviction in his own righteousness, and bottomless need for validation have warped him into a near-alien creature. Or an alien creature whose desire for those things has forced him to take on a vaguely human form. Pattinson plays this cypher for awkward laughs at every turn — whether he’s confronting a perp, getting beta’d by real newsman Stone Phillips, or pleading forgiveness at the feet of his fed-up wife — he deepens the oddity of the whole project. Bolen puts him amid shadows and richly saturated settings, be it the halls of power, pumping himself up for his big moments in the backrooms of these grody model homes, or showing his kids an episode on television. He’s at the glowing center of his own rocket ship; so when the network boss concedes that scripted television is dying and gives the show a spot against ratings juggernaut Lost, there’s no way he’s letting go.
When his personal life gets more complicated, Hansen craves riskier and riskier stings to juice the ratings, centering the plot around the hunt for a “whale” to solve all of his problems. Oppenheim shows us all facets of the machine ramping up, from the sleepless internet fishing to the logistics of rushed operations. Trademark shallow focus extreme close-ups capture the mood of frayed desperation and rain-pelted windows make an ideal lens for the murkiness of their pursuit. In centering the manic action in a comedic mode as the walls close in, the show hoists its own ridiculousness: this was a show that, after all, overstated the scale of risk for being online and happily consorted with self-serving local law enforcement and lunatic vigilantes for ratings. These are not serious people, and Opeoplem doesn’t pretend otherwise.
The whole thing moves along at friendly clip. Like the TV audience at home and his fans in the world, you can’t really get enough of Pattinson’s version of Chris Hansen as a sad weird man surfing the currents of fame. He deploys his catchphrases like daggers. His face does insane micro-movements as he tries to recalibrate to human wavelengths or in battle with vending machines who have wronged him. It’s a haunted performance of hollowness, that’s mirrored by his similarly driven co-conspirators. Doubts may linger, but the film races ever-forward and this garish world is disconcertingly fun viewing that implicates us just a little bit in the leering thrill of it all. It’s only as the film rushes headlong into a looming pre-ordained conclusion that we realize just how little it’s gestured toward the emotional toll on the people who enable the operations; even less toward the seriousness of the would-be crimes. By then, it’s really too late. But that’s not really this film’s raison d’être; there’s already a perfectly good documentary for that.
Primetime arrives in theaters on September 25
Image courtesy A24.