Primetime Review

This review is based on a screening from the Venice Film Festival. Primetime is in theaters on September 25.

You don’t have to be familiar with Chris Hansen or To Catch a Predator to enjoy Primetime — director Lance Oppenheim’s feature debut — but it certainly helps. That’s not because the movie sticks closely to real events, but rather, because it takes some audacious swings while purposefully fudging the timeline. Watching exactly how and why it takes these liberties is a delight of its own; the result is a sleazy, rollicking, razor-wire drama that’s every bit about the rise of reality TV as it is a spiritual part of it. Anything is fair game if it makes for a good story.

It begins with TV personality Hansen (Robert Pattinson) privately repeating sexually explicit chat logs sent from a skeevy former Marine (Tony Revolori) to a fictitious adolescent. As he rehearses to ambush the unsuspecting perv — the premise of his hit sting operation, which ran from 2004 to 2007 — the movie starts to reveal its lurid flourishes. Awash in shadow, its heightened version of Hansen is a cartoonishly sinister figure who steps before the cameras with all the boastful poise of a Broadway veteran. When he finally reveals himself to Revolori — after gazing at him through a crack in a door, like some stalker or slasher villain — he towers over the former soldier like a hunter cornering prey.

As his show rises through the ranks, NBC executives make eager demands — Bigger! Flashier! More! — which leads Hansen and his team to more opportunistically (and more voraciously) pursue potential perps, eventually chasing someone they suspect of having a position of influence. Those in the know will recognize this throughline as that of the series’ botched episode emanating from Murphy, Texas, and the subject of the incredible long-form Esquire piece on which Primetime was based. However, en route to that tragic debacle, the movie takes incredibly entertaining turns, buoyed by a raucous visual energy while remaining rooted in surprisingly cogent drama.

The film has no qualms about its culprits’ misdeeds, but it makes sure to frame Hansen and, well, almost everyone involved with the show as some kind of seducer too, whether through its visual framing or its cast’s creepy physicality. A magnetic Merritt Wever plays Hansen’s fictitious producer Andie Bender, whose polite tone disguises exploitative commands, while Matthew Maher portrays the real Xavier Von Erk, the keyboard warrior enthusiastically ensnaring potential perps. Rounding out the sting crew are the experienced, conscientious adult decoy Del (Phoebe Bridgers), a self-professed activist who has the bait-and-switch process of welcoming child predators down pat, and nubile newcomer Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) — based loosely on Dan Schrack — a wannabe actor out to prove himself and join the Screen Actors Guild.

Gisondo is the movie’s naïve heart and soul. While initially unaware of the job he agrees to, Dan is eager to please his bosses, especially the imposing Hansen, with whom he forms a perverse father-son dynamic. All Dan wants is approval, but Hansen’s attention is always elsewhere, either on trying to up his TV ratings, or on retaining the illusion of domestic bliss with his wife and sons, while he’s either out philandering — a later development in Hansen’s life brought forward for the movie — or worse, making money off garish spectacle.

The real Hansen hasn’t seen the film at the time of this writing, though this hasn’t stopped him from threatening legal action. Regardless, it’s hard to imagine he’d be pleased with Pattinson’s portrayal — but unfortunately, he might be alone in his displeasure. The Batman star has never been better or more explosive, delivering a jester-like performance as a man envious of other news hosts’ success — and by proxy, of the era of war-as-entertainment. Pattinson smuggles, beneath the character’s wholesome poise, a petulant, paranoid man with a distinctly rehearsed quality. That he nails Hansen’s voice is a fantastic party trick, but this is, quite fittingly, the only truly Hansen-esque thing about him. He’s Chris Hansen in name and occupation; in spirit, he’s an impish embodiment of Hollywood id at the turn of the century, a TV landscape defined by façade, and the willingness to step on anyone to get ahead.

Driven enough to believe his own hype, Hansen commands the movie’s breakneck unfurling as the sickly centerpiece of several rapid montages and a palette that’s both oversaturated and has too much contrast for comfort. Its sensory re-creation of cheap, mid-2000s video recordings makes it especially eerie, as though Primetime were a version of a events we were never meant to see — made all the more haunting by Hansen’s strange segues into fictitious Indian folklore, meant to build himself up as some spiritual savior.

The dialogue and its double meanings are incredibly on-the-nose — what Hansen says, versus what he means deep down, is a disconnect apparent to everyone but him — resulting in some jaw-dropping hilarity. While there’s certainly a wider discussion to be had about the show’s methods and its modern legacy, this conversation is already underway courtesy of the aforementioned Esquire piece, as well as David Osit’s 2025 documentary Predators, an intimate retrospective on the series.