You can practically hear the fuzz of the television screen as you watch Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, which tracks the rise and fall of Chris Hansen and Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator, a show that, arguably, changed television and media forever. Sure, there was Survivor and the Real Housewives franchise, two reality television endeavors that changed the landscape of that genre and birthed a vast empire of capital-obsessed viewers. But To Catch a Predator warped and molded the modern sense of justice and evil, not only letting audiences watch as Hansen meted out his own brand of justice to unsuspecting predators, but eventually making audiences feel as if they were active participants in it. In Primetime, Robert Pattinson takes on the role of Hansen, who worked with a group called Perverted Justice to lure men to homes where they thought they were meeting up with children. Over three years, it only aired 20 episodes, a testament to the amount of work that went into capturing these segments. That work is overseen in the film by Merritt Wever’s gum-snapping producer Andie Bender, who lurks in video villages and comforts decoys with false platitudes and a well-crafted fake smile. Her sick fascination with the job mirrors Hansen’s, though her motives are less clear. Hansen, however, makes his crystal. In one standout scene, Pattinson speaks to Skyler Gisondo’s decoy Dan, telling him a story about reporting on missing children in India. Eventually, he reveals that his ultimate goal is to eradicate evil from the face of the planet. But Primetime asks: What is the true face of evil? Is it the masked man in the window, already inside your home and ready to do unspeakable things? Is it a wolf taking children from a small Indian village? Or is it the man on your television screen pretending to be fighting for a righteous cause while profiting off the suffering of others? Primetime doesn’t really seek to answer these questions, nor is it entirely capable of doing so.
Primetime Is A Slimy Delight

Primetime doesn’t need to answer them, though, for it serves as an indictment of the very existence of these questions; an exploration of why we let evil into our homes, either through the front door or the glass television screen in the living room, and what happens when we do so. In Hansen’s world, he’s there to stop that evil in its tracks, all so that his television show can be bigger than Lost and that, just maybe, his wife won’t leave him despite his infidelity. There’s an effort to connect Hansen’s philandering with the larger thematic thrust of the movie, something that doesn’t quite connect, in the same way that some of the film’s goals don’t come to fruition.

None of this would work without the supporting work of Wever, Gisondo, and singer Phoebe Bridgers…

Primetime serves as the perfect companion piece to last year’s documentary Predators from director David Osit, a more direct examination of Hansen’s outward projection of righteousness. Oppenheim’s film is more internal and, by the end, Hansen morphs into the man the documentary asserts that he’s become. Pattinson is giving a career-best performance here in what is already a banner year for the star. He captures Hansen’s trademark voice and mannerisms with a slippery finesse that is disquieting in its control, especially when things around him start to go off the rails. None of this would work without the supporting work of Wever, Gisondo, and singer Phoebe Bridgers, who round out Hansen’s team. Bridgers and Gisondo, who play decoys Del and Dan, respectively, bounce between a disturbing mask of adolescence and a sense of righteousness that echoes Hansen’s, but doesn’t quite reach his heights. The film underscores that contrast when the host’s sense of morality begins to bubble up inside the unsuspecting Dan. This all culminates in Primetime’s chilling third act, largely based on “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” a 2007 Esquire piece by Luke Dittrich that gives an inside look at the segment that led to the end of Hansen’s show. Primetime dramatizes this segment in a way that feels perfectly suited to our vigilante-justice times, eschewing its mode as a screed on early 2000s television to reach across time and become a warning about the ways in which this kind of justice is antithetical to the endeavor and the idea of “justice” as a whole.

It’s an arresting if flawed portrait, one that still feels startlingly relevant today. To Catch a Predator may be off the air, but Hansen is still peddling copycats on other networks, while groups of people are running their own Predator-style shows on YouTube to be consumed en masse. In that way, Primetime is an origin story of sorts; a look at what this kind of justice can become when it is unchecked, or simply overseen by one man who sees ratings as the ultimate weapon against an unnatural evil. Primetime releases in theaters on Friday, September 25.

Release Date

September 25, 2026

Runtime

110 minutes

Director

Lance Oppenheim

Writers

Ajon Singh

Producers

Ari Aster, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Brighton McCloskey, Fred Berger, Lars Knudsen, Robert Pattinson, William Iannaccone