Buzzing with the sound of dial-up internet and the hum of grainy VHS tape, Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” about Chris Hansen and his Dateline NBC series “To Catch a Predator,” identifies a seedy moment when media became the new arbiter of communal justice.
In “Primetime,” Hansen, as played with malicious precision by Robert Pattinson, is an ambitious TV journalist who scores big ratings by luring child predators out in front of his network TV cameras. But, more than that, he’s a new breed of media power — less a real person than a sleek assemblage of pixels who can, with a damning voiceover and a good close-up, seal a sad soul’s fate for videotape eternity.
In the opening scene of “Primetime,” Hansen has cornered a Long Beach, California, man who’s arrived to meet someone he thinks is a 13-year-old girl. Hansen strides into frame and asks the cowering man what his fate should be. “The electric chair?” he guiltily replies. No, Hansen says. “Dateline NBC.” A look of utter horror spreads across the man’s face.
That this minor character is played by Tony Revolori, the wonderful, kindly and too-little-seen star of “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” is more than a hint at Oppenheim’s sympathies. The British critic Charlie Brooker once wrote of “To Catch a Predator”: “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child-rapists, you know it’s doing something wrong.” It's a good encapsulation of the moral dread that pulses through “Primetime.”
This is Oppenheim’s first feature film. The 30-year-old filmmaker has previously worked primarily in documentary, including the HBO series “Ren Faire” and the upcoming Elizabeth Holmes film “You Can See Everything,” co-directed with Nathan Fielder. And, perhaps because of that nonfiction sensibility, “Primetime” neither has a strong dramatic thrust nor offers especially deep portraits of its characters, including “Predator” producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), online vigilante Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) and two of its actor “decoys”: Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) and Del Harvey (Phoebe Bridgers). A more detailed history can be found in David Osit’s 2025 documentary, “Predators.”
Instead, “Primetime,” written by first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh, is predicated on a moment in time when something sinister was shifting in the media landscape. “TV is changing,” pronounces none other than Jeff Zucker, the former NBC Universal chief, playing himself. He frankly tells Hansen that he doesn’t like “To Catch a Predator,” but audiences do. He places the series in primetime, on Wednesday nights opposite ABC's “Lost,” ratcheting up the pressure for Hansen and company to deliver fresh blood. Viewers, no doubt, will be reminded, among other television news portraits, of Dan Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler,” the nocturnal neo-noir of “if it bleeds, it leads” local TV news.
A little glibly, “Primetime” revels in the dated ’00s aspirations of its characters: wannabe serious journalists chasing ratings and Hollywood hopefuls, like Dan, who are coaxed into performing as underaged children. The movie is always sitting in judgment of its characters — not an unfair perspective, by any means, but not one prone to three-dimensionality.
Then again, “Primetime” is most concerned with two-dimensional screens and their capacity to wreck lives, warranted or not. When a fan sitting next to Hansen on a plane asks him if he’s ever tempted to physically “bleed” the show’s targets, he smiles and replies, with a touch of pride: “I think what I do is maybe a little worse.”
Yet the cast elevates the film, especially Wever, whose producer is so casually good at the kind of manipulation her job requires. Bridgers is also an uncannily natural presence in her first major movie role.
But “Primetime” belongs to Pattinson. He’s always been best in more tightly outlined roles where his natural inclination to blur the edges can really go places. (This year has been especially good in this regard, with Pattinson playing the memorably unnerved fiancé of “The Drama” and the sleazy suitor Antinous of “The Odyssey.”) In “Primetime,” his Hansen is an anxious adjudicator whose zeal for a bigger target — a “whale” — comes as his hypocrisy grows more apparent. A National Enquirer reporter keeps calling with his own expose on Hansen.
From the film’s first moments, though, we know that what Hansen vilifies is within him, too. He sits quoting, maybe relishing, the lurid chat room exchanges of his subject. There aren’t many surprises in this vividly realized but predetermined drama. Yet it’s hard to argue with the case it presents. Says Hansen: “There used to be a pillory in every village. Now, there’s a television in every living room.”
