Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime is one of the weirdest, most fascinating, and flat-out entertaining movies I’ve seen all year. It’s a movie about To Catch a Predator, Chris Hansen, online culture, ambition, obsession, morality, and the strange machinery behind one of the most infamous television shows of the 2000s. Somehow, it’s also a movie that flies by. I looked up and the 1 hour and 50 minutes were basically gone.
And at the center of it all is Robert Pattinson, giving what might be the best performance of his career.
Pattinson is a chameleon. At this point, I don’t know how else to describe him. This year alone, he’s played a quirky, awkward romantic lead, a completely different kind of villain in The Odyssey, and now Chris Hansen. You know you’re watching Robert Pattinson, but it genuinely feels like you’re watching three completely different people. His Hansen is almost an out-of-body performance. The voice, the mannerisms, the facial expressions, the way he carries himself—it’s all so specific that there are stretches where Pattinson completely disappears into the character.
This is the kind of performance that reminds you why he’s a movie star. He can do Batman. He can do Dune. He can do enormous studio movies. But then he can take something this strange and sink himself completely into a character who is far removed from anything we’ve seen him play before. He clearly seems drawn to challenging himself, and Primetime feels like another example of him throwing himself into something completely unexpected and absolutely nailing it.
But Primetime isn’t only interested in Hansen as a television personality. Oppenheim seems much more interested in the idea of ambition—and what happens when ambition turns into obsession.
Hansen becomes increasingly convinced that what he is doing is bigger than television. He wants the huge story, the giant catch, the moment that will finally establish him and the show as something truly important. There’s a sense that he looks around NBC and sees other people getting the fame and recognition he thinks he deserves, while believing that what he’s doing is far more significant. That hunger becomes part of what drives him, but it also becomes part of what ultimately destroys him.
The movie doesn’t simply portray Hansen as a monster. In fact, that’s what makes it more interesting. He is doing something that, on the surface, has an obvious moral justification, but the movie keeps asking what happens when the people doing that work become consumed by the spectacle of it. The show required its participants to spend their days immersed in some of the ugliest material imaginable. Merritt Wever’s Andi understands that better than almost anyone.
Wever is fantastic. Andi serves as an important counterbalance to Hansen, because she understands how difficult it is to remain a good person while constantly surrounding yourself with terrible people and terrible things. The movie never suggests that the people making To Catch a Predator are equivalent to the people they expose, but it does understand that repeatedly immersing yourself in that world can have an effect on you.
Skyler Gisondo is equally terrific as Dan Plum, a young aspiring actor who becomes involved with the show by portraying a 13-year-old boy. Gisondo completely commits to the role, from the voice to the mannerisms, and there’s something genuinely impressive about watching him essentially disappear into another performance inside the performance. And once again, ambition becomes part of the character. Dan desperately wants to become an actor, and this bizarre television job becomes another opportunity to chase that dream.
That’s the movie’s fascinating connection between all of these characters: they’re all chasing something. Hansen wants recognition. Andi wants to navigate the moral minefield of the production. Dan wants to become an actor. The entire production is chasing the ultimate “whale,” the catch that will finally make everything worthwhile.
And when they find that whale, things go horribly wrong.
The movie’s treatment of the real-life events surrounding the show is shocking, particularly because you know where some of it is heading, yet Oppenheim builds so much tension around it anyway. The consequences of Hansen’s obsession become impossible to ignore, and the lawsuits and fallout that follow become part of the larger collapse.
Visually, Primetime is absolutely stunning.
Oppenheim brings a documentary sensibility to the narrative-film format, and the movie constantly feels like it is being viewed through cameras, surveillance footage, television screens, reflections, and fragments of recorded reality. There are split screens, reflective surfaces, broken mirrors, neon lighting, strange angles, and compositions that make the movie feel like it is constantly examining its characters from the outside.
The imagery of Pattinson looking at himself in mirrors is particularly striking. The fractured reflections feel completely appropriate for a movie about a man becoming increasingly consumed by his own image and the mythology surrounding his career.
And then there’s the score, which gives the entire movie this frenetic, chaotic energy. To Catch a Predator was inherently chaotic: somebody walks into a house, starts talking to a supposed child, Hansen suddenly appears, the police get involved, and everything can change in an instant. The score captures that feeling. It keeps you uneasy and on your toes without allowing the movie to settle into a predictable rhythm.
Somehow, all of this works alongside a surprisingly strong sense of humor.
Primetime is obviously dealing with horrific subject matter, so the comedy creates an intentionally uncomfortable experience. But Hansen’s one-liners, the absurdity of the production itself, and the sheer bizarre nature of some of these situations genuinely made me laugh. The movie understands that something can be disturbing and ridiculous at the exact same time.
And that’s ultimately what makes Primetime so fascinating. It’s a drama, a comedy, a character study, a recreation of a television phenomenon, and almost a documentary about the process of making a documentary. It’s weird, bizarre, chaotic, stylish, funny, uncomfortable, and completely engrossing.
Most importantly, it feels like an actual movie rather than simply a dramatization of something that happened.
And then you have Robert Pattinson at the center of it, giving one of my favorite performances of the year.
I went into Primetime with huge expectations. Pattinson is my favorite actor, and everything about this project sounded like exactly the kind of strange swing I wanted him to take. Somehow, the movie lived up to all of that hype.
Primetime is one of my favorite films of the year. It’s one of the coolest-looking movies I’ve seen all year, one of the strangest, and one of the most unexpectedly entertaining. Oppenheim takes this bizarre chapter of television history and turns it into something much bigger about ambition, identity, obsession, and the price of believing that what you’re doing is more important than it really is.
And Pattinson? He’s incredible.
This is what a movie star looks like when he’s willing to disappear.
Primetime = 91/100
