Primetime (dir. Lance Oppenheim)

by Jack Martin | Oct 29, 2026

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 109 mins

UK Distributor: A24

UK Release Date: 28 October 2026

WHO’S IN PRIMETIME?

Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Matthew Maher, Bokeem Woodbine, Anna Faris, Jonathan Lipnicki, Tony Revolori, Alex Winter, Eric Rahill, Sean Bridgers, Jeff Zucker, Creed Bratton, Caroline Hebert, Jessica Hecht

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Lance Oppenheim (director), Ajon Singh (writer), Ari Aster, Fred Berger, William Iannaccone, Brian Kavanagh-Jones, Lars Knudsen, Brighton McCloskey and Robert Pattinson (producers), Ari Balouzian (composer), David Bolen (cinematographer), Daniel Garber (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Chris Hansen (Pattinson) seeks greatness with his show To Catch a Predator…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON PRIMETIME?

I was right there in the mid-2000s when To Catch a Predator was all the rage. Reality television was hitting its stride at the time, for better or worse (predominantly worse), but the Chris Hansen-fronted Dateline NBC show was special: it embarked a noble mission to put some of the scummiest people on the planet on everyone’s screens during the primetime slot, and expose them for who they truly were. As much as well like to tell ourselves how much of a mind-numbing exploitation of stupidity reality TV is, we can’t deny that we all loved watching Hansen lure unsuspecting paedophiles into a camera-laden trap, emerge from hiding and then gently berate them for their actions before bringing the cops in to arrest them.

Seeing it all unfold in such dramatic fashion within director Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime brought back all those memories of watching To Catch a Predator either on television or as clips on the then-new YouTube, since it eerily captures the scuzzy feeling that one gets from watching such a show and amplifies it in ways where you feel just as guilty as the wrong’uns on that show. But beyond that sense of nostalgia, this is a heavily exaggerated yet ferociously entertaining thriller which reframes the core concept of the show as a modern-day Moby Dick, with Hansen as our Captain Ahab searching obsessively for the ultimate whale of a catch.

By the time we meet Robert Pattinson as Hansen in this movie, he and his eternally gum-chewing producer Andie (Merritt Wever) have already perfected the formula for his show: their team, fronted by anti-paedophile vigilante Xavier (Matthew Maher), ignites racy online chats with child molesters under the guise of underage teens, they arrange to meet with a youthful-looking actor playing the child, and then Hansen confronts them with impromptu filmed interviews. Their show has become such an overnight success that they’ve just been moved to the coveted primetime slot, competing against hugely popular shows on other networks like Lost, and with that comes a greater desire within Hansen to search for more than just lowlifes: in almost direct Moby Dick terms, he wants a whale of his own, and to capture the entire thing on camera for the world to see.

It’s not so much a point-by-point study of how the show came into existence or how they even managed to persuade the network to even air it – I’ll assume that’s what last year’s documentary Predators covered when discussing the very same topic – but more of a fascinating descent into madness as the desire for notoriety becomes so overwhelming for Hansen and his team that it ends up blocking out all the other senses, including that all-important sense of morality. There’s such a burning ferocity in Oppenheim’s execution of Ajon Singh’s script as we see the respective director and writer create a fictionalised rendition of real events that, ironically, present the team behind this show as predators of a different variety. Through their feverishly surreal visual and storytelling style, the filmmakers posit how it’s all some kind of mythic quest for them, one that comes with promises of riches by journey’s end but instead takes away from them the treasure they should have been preserving this whole time.

Take this film’s version of Chris Hansen, for instance. As brought to life by Pattinson in one of his finest performances, the figure is presented as a narcissist so consumed by the thought that he is making a difference in the world that he’ll distort his own reality in order to present himself as a god-like televisual figure to everyone he comes across. Even when he’s on the phone to his wife, as played by an underused Anna Faris, he announces himself as though he was introducing himself on camera. But as the search for his metaphorical whale intensifies, much like with Ahab you can sense this person becoming more and more of a morally grey area as his pursuit begins to endanger his crew, his family and even himself, yet the thrill of the hunt is so powerful to him that it clouds over everything else. It’s a character and performance that is so much fun to watch, because you’re so caught up in his easy charisma and soothing journalist vocals that his more unhinged moments catch you off guard and give you as much of a rush as he consistently has.

But the clever thing about Primetime is how it also shows the detrimental side-effects of one’s pursuit of glory at the expense of morality. One of the film’s main focal points is Dan Plum (an excellent Skyler Gisondo), a young actor newly hired on the show who within minutes of arriving on set for the first time is forced to improvise with a predator that just flat out exposes himself and has some seriously twisted sexual requests, some involving some whipped cream and a cat (adding to the uncomfortable hilarity of this moment is the fact that the predator is played by, of all people, former child actor Jonathan Lipnicki of Jerry Maguire and Stuart Little fame). Through Dan, we see a sobering lens to the wild nature of this show and its questionable tactics, and how in the pursuit of his own ambitions – he’s eager to earn his SAG card from all of this – he himself begins to fall prey to the intoxicating aura of Hansen and his producers before things inevitably become too overbearing and, in one climactic instance, dangerous to actual life.

Sometimes, Oppenheim likes to leave things a little too much to the imagination, which can undercut some of the logic that certain characters operate on, but his take on a scuzzy cultural phenomenon like To Catch a Predator is a smart, engrossing, and hugely entertaining takedown of ambition and obsession that, as it did in Moby Dick, ends in utter devastation for nearly everyone involved.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Primetime is a stylish and hugely entertaining dramatisation of the cultural phenomenon that was To Catch a Predator, which the filmmakers frame as a fascinating Moby Dick-like tale of obsession and ambition, with a never-better Robert Pattinson as its unhinged Captain Ahab in the form of host Chris Hansen.