The saying goes: Set a thief to catch a thief. But what about a predator? Portraying the professionally carnivorous Chris Hansen in Primetime, Robert Pattinson reaches an apex—he stalks his trembling prey with a mix of sweaty indignation and reptilian chill. The sterile, cavernous suburban houses that he and his staff have repurposed as ad hoc honeypots are unnatural habitats, and they suit him. Emerging out of the shadows to hit his mark, he’s somewhere between a diva and a vigilante; his hair is so plastered into place that he already resembles his own action figure. Call him The Dark Knightcrawler.
The idea of a Dateline correspondent who’s internalized the idea of himself as a sort of superhero is grimly funny, and the casting of Pattinson, who’s due back in Gotham soon, is a conceptual masterstroke. More important than the comic-book pedigree, though, is the performance itself, which is broad, clammy and hilarious—a sinister and vivid bit of cartooning to rival anything on South Park. The real Hansen happily giggled along with Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s affectionate mockery; he claimed that appearing in animated form opposite Eric Cartman made him seem cooler to his kids. He was also perfectly happy to parody his stentorian shtick in 2006 with Conan O’Brien at the Emmys, probably because he knew he was being handled with kid gloves.
It would seem, though, that the newly minted streaming platform magnate—Google “TruBlu”—is pissed off at Pattinson’s lip-smacking impersonation. “He’s saying things I never said and doing things I never did, and that’s not who I am,” Hansen complained to Entertainment Tonight; he also called the film an “insult” in The Hollywood Reporter. The irony of a man who made his fortune peddling elaborate public humiliation rituals feeling misrepresented is rich—ditto the revelation that Hansen had apparently been pitching Primetime director Lance Oppenheim on potential projects after the latter’s wife commissioned him for a congratulatory Cameo message.
“In a weird way, this film is almost an adaptation of the Cameo video,” Oppenheim told The Hollywood Reporter. “He had been absorbed into this strange, performative version of himself.” For the record, Hansen’s criticisms of Pattinson’s acting and Primetime’s contents were based solely on the film’s trailer. He still hasn’t actually seen the movie, not even after Oppenheim magnanimously invited his subject to have a seat.
Such rhetorical jiu-jitsu—the art of weaponizing celebrities against their own personas for fun and profit—is Oppenheim’s brand. Having made a name for himself on the documentary circuit with a series of Errol Morris-ish portraits of All-American eccentrics (pickleball-playing retirees; unregulated sperm donors; a Texan Renaissance Fair dynasty), the 30-year-old Harvard grad is set to become ubiquitous with a pair of provocative black comedies about infamous grifters. Shortly after Primetime bowed at Venice, Oppenheim descended on the Telluride Film Festival with Nathan Fielder to preview their co-directorial effort You Can See Everything, a three-hour epic which reportedly subjects Elizabeth Holmes—currently posting the film’s buzzy trailer from jail—to the Fielder Method. “I don’t have anything to deceive you on,” the Theranos fraudster whispers in the trailer to Nathan, who isn’t buying it. What were we saying about the best way to catch a thief?
Primetime may not necessarily admire Hansen’s skill set, but it gives him his due. “It’s funny,” Oppenheim told The Globe and Mail. “As a kid … I saw so many episodes of these programs satirizing To Catch a Predator, and there was something almost mythological about [him]. He almost had these superpowers. He could compel anybody to come inside the kitchen where the crew was set up, have a seat, grab a slice of pizza or munch on a cookie as he would then dismantle their lives on television.”
For younger viewers, the detail that To Catch a Predator’s cyber-vigilante partner organization actually went by the name Perverted-Justice might seem hard to believe; occasionally, even the most exaggerated satire comes up short of actual reality. Crucially, Primetime doesn’t minimize or equivocate the behavior of Hansen’s targets; instead, it rejects the wholesale packaging of their pathology as a form of rubbernecking entertainment. The ingenuity of Perverted-Justice’s lead investigator, Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) is linked to his unacknowledged—but unmistakable—excitement at getting to trawl around in the proverbial cesspool; he gets off on peddling jailbait fantasies from behind a keyboard. His disembodied chatroom improv fits into Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh’s overall conceptual matrix—this is on every level a movie about performance. It’s filled with moments that foreground acting: auditions, rehearsals, and plenty of debates about motivation. The first time we see Chris, he’s running lines and honing his trademark deadpan just out of frame. His obsessive professionalism is juxtaposed against the earnest, happy-to-be-here naivete of the show’s latest hire, Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), a striver who’s trying to earn his SAG card.
The character of “Decoy Dan” is modeled after Dan Schrack, who has publicly decried his own participation in To Catch a Predator; he’s gone so far as to say that he wouldn’t take $10 million to do it again. The use of former child star Gisondo, still fresh and freckle-faced at 30, is inspired—he’s plausible as a novice being groomed into complicity. Dan functions as an audience surrogate, but Gisondo does well to give him some depth and shading. He projects the nervous exhilaration of an understudy thrust into the spotlight on opening night.
There are interesting casting choices everywhere in Primetime: Merrit Weaver, stalwart and hollow as Hansen’s segment producer Andie Bender; Phoebe Bridgers lurking lissomely in vintage band tees as a disillusioned decoy; and an unrecognizable Alex Winter as the mostly unseen “whale”—slang for a massively high-value but elusive target—who brings out Hansen’s inner Ahab. These performances are all strong; Pattinson, though, is overpowering. He may well earn hardware for his work in Primetime, but not because he’s chasing it. His adventurousness hints at something else. No similarly bankable actor of his age and generation has styled himself onscreen more eccentrically and worked with a more unusual slate of filmmakers; that Pattinson let David Cronenberg coax him into getting an onscreen prostate examination in Cosmopolis before the Twilight series had technically ended makes him a legend. He’s able to sublimate his vanity on command; compare his uncanny disappearing act in Good Time to Adam Sandler’s charismatic victory-lapping in Uncut Gems.
So far in 2026, Pattinson has given rich, textured performances in three very different films, all of which exist in loquacious conversation with one another. The hapless psychosexual angst of the cold-footed groom in The Drama—fretting over his public reputation while daydreaming absently about a teenage version of his fiancée—converges in Primetime with the ugly ambition of Pattinson’s Odyssey villain. Like Antinous, Hansen is a blowhard narcissist trying to power through a case of impostor syndrome; whoever inevitably makes the “get these pedos out of here” meme will reap a social media windfall. The more the character strives for self-righteous gravitas, the more ridiculous he becomes—a would-be puppet-master jerking his own strings along with everyone else’s. “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” he asks Tony Revolori’s sad-eyed target—screen name MarriedAndLookingForFun31313—in the opening sequence. Considering that the entire rendezvous has been staged for the benefit of the camera, with no actual teenagers in the vicinity (just Bridgers’s decoy in male drag), one could argue that the answer to that smirking, not-so-rhetorical question is, simply and troublingly: absolutely nothing.
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“If there’s no news I’ll go out and bite a dog,” said Kirk Douglas’s ink-stained wretch Chuck Tatum back in Billy Wilder’s scabrous 1951 classic Ace in the Hole—still the cinematic gold standard for excoriating the fourth estate, and a big part of Primetime’s DNA (along with Network, To Die For, and Nightcrawler). Chris has the same instincts as his spiritual predecessor; called on the carpet at 30 Rock by NBC honcho Jeff Zucker—who plays himself in an effective but slightly head-scratching cameo that testifies to the profit-motivated shamelessness of a man who greenlit The Apprentice—Chris implies to his boss that he’s similarly willing to go out and make big things happen. Primetime’s ratings-or-bust metaphysics link it to the aforementioned reporter-gone-bad classics, as well as rendering it a millennial period piece. In retrospect, the only thing more outrageous than the scenario of Hansen’s edition of Dateline being aired opposite Lost is that so much supposedly urgent, unmissable appointment network television existed in the first place.
Gradually, Primetime finds its shape as a downward spiral; its worst-case trajectory is based on Luke Dittrich’s infamous 2007 Esquire feature “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die.” That attention-grabbing title was neither hyperbolic nor a metaphor; Dittrich’s piece broke down the terrifying chain of events by which Dallas-Fort Worth Assistant District Attorney William Conradt was ensnared by one of Hansen’s schemes and served with an arrest warrant in his home in Murphy, Texas. Conradt responded by shooting himself dead shortly after the SWAT team arrived with Hansen and his team in tow; the crew recorded horrifying footage of the scene as well as audio of Conradt’s anguished last words. That death is also chronicled in David Osit’s fine 2025 documentary Predators, a carefully calibrated piece of reportage to which Oppenheim’s film plays as a freaky B-side. In it, one of the policemen who showed up at Conradt’s home refers to the suicide as “a stain on his soul.” (For his part, Hansen has no regrets.)
That Oppenheim is interested in stains and souls is obvious from Primetime’s visual style, which is steeped in early-millennial ugliness; it was shot by cinematographer David Bolen on video and then transferred onto 16mm film, effectively turning every frame into contested territory between analog and digital formats. The imagery isn’t just period-specific—it’s expressive, suggesting a world made in Hansen’s own sleaze-coated image. Such all-encompassing ugliness can be persuasive, but the question of what, exactly, we’re being asked—or told—to think about To Catch a Predator, its audience, and its legacy is ambiguous bordering on opaque. For all the fun the filmmakers have in conjuring up a nightmare version of the early 21st century, they don’t do much to examine the accompanying zeitgeist; the extreme militarization of the Murphy police force is an evocative detail, but Singh and Oppenheim resist (or miss) the opportunity to double Hansen with the era’s blustery, fear-mongering conservative politicians or alpha-male TV heroes. (It’s easy enough to imagine Kiefer Sutherland inviting the bad guys on 24 to sit down and relax before waterboarding them.)
Primetime probably goes too far in psychologizing its antihero. The explanation, offered late in the game, that Hansen is bent on tracking down sex offenders in order to clear his conscience after witnessing a series of child murders in India—that he means to purge the world of an ancient, insidious evil—is not only absurd but it grinds against the satirical thrust of the whole movie. These passages are somehow lurid and reductive at the same time—a dark joke that Oppenheim doesn’t quite have the dexterity to pull off. The quasi-supernatural inserts of demonic masks nod to The Exorcist—or maybe producer Ari Aster—but either way, they’re a mistake; they push things into horror-movie territory.
Primetime’s mise-en-scene is slovenly by design, but its ironies are tidy. Oppenheim’s showmanship is real and so are its limitations; he’s so determined to shock and appall the audience that he never gets around to what the most unsettling movies about mass media do: implicate them. He certainly doesn’t trust them: “there used to be a pillory in every village, now, there's a television in every living room,” says Chris at one point, hitting the theme so hard on the nose that it threatens to deviate the movie’s septum. We never get the sense, though, that he’s talking about our living rooms; we would never fall for it. A trickier movie might have risked earnestly conveying the appeal and catharsis of To Catch a Predator’s humiliation rituals instead of just marinating in artful disgust. While the choking claustrophobia of Primetime, with its extreme close-ups and invasive surveillance monitors, is dazzling, it also serves, however paradoxically, to let us off the hook.