Directed by: Lance Oppenheim.
Written by: Ajon Singh.
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, and Skyler Gisondo.
Runtime: 110 minutes
Chris Hansen drama ‘Primetime’ gazes into the moral abyss of American media
“You see how this looks, right?”
Robert Pattinson nails the phrase, capturing Chris Hansen’s unctuous news anchor cadence and his knowing smirk as he gets an unwitting would-be pedophile dead to rights on camera for his hit series “To Catch a Predator.”
It’s gratifying the first time you hear it and watch a grown man squirm at having his twisted fantasies exposed. But that question takes on greater weight over the runtime of “Primetime,” a film that dramatizes the spectacular rise and fall of the infamous hidden-camera “Dateline NBC” reality program that was one big sting operation built to entrap adult men seeking sex with underage girls and boys – for our entertainment.
“You see how this looks, right?” begins to feel like a question being asked not just of the perpetrators, but of Hansen, and possibly even us.
Pattinson is unnerving as Hansen, dead-eyed and emotionally opaque even as he relishes the game, going from city to city setting up trap houses and luring lustful men on the internet to their televised doom, using adult actors posing as teens. Off-camera, Pattinson’s Hansen talks less like a journalist and more like an avenging angel, a man who sees himself as the wrath of the Lord come to visit judgment on the unclean. “You’re cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” he tells Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), an eager but uneasy new recruit to the cause who’s less interested in catching child sexual predators than he is in getting is SAG card. Plumb’s diminutive stature, bright eyes, wide smile, and freckled face make him look young enough to be the pubescent boy he plays to ensnare an increasingly grotesque series of men.
Merritt Wever is particularly fantastic as Andie Bender, the show’s ambitious, unflappable, gum-smacking producer, who thrusts wide-eyed Plumb into an escalating series of scenarios in search of higher ratings now that their show is in the same timeslot as ratings giant “Lost.” What they need is a big score, to capture not some mewling, basement-dwelling pervert, but someone with social clout.
“Who gave you permission to do this?” one of Hansen’s marks asks him as the camera zooms in on his reddening face.
Nobody needed to. The aughts were a lawless time in media, with the internet and reality TV both in their relative infancy and few guardrails or best practices in place. “To Catch a Predator” appeared that decade alongside some truly abhorrent reality programming, wretched shows like “The Swan,” which put ordinary “ugly duckling” women under the knife to chase unobtainable beauty standards, and “The Anna Nicole Show,” which put cameras in the house of an unwell woman clearly in distress until both she and her son were dead of a drug overdose while we gawped and chuckled.
In “Primetime,” director Lance Oppenheim makes a chilling argument that “To Catch a Predator” deserves to be considered alongside those moral failures, in which human suffering and ritual humiliation were staged for our entertainment. Shot in a surveillance-style 4:3 ratio that feels like TV in the era of early digital photography, “Primetime” has a sickly, gritty feel, as if the camera lens were coated in grime. It’s an effective enough aesthetic that one begins to feel unclean watching it. It will be fascinating to see how Oppenheim’s other 2026 film, the documentary “You Can See Everything” co-directed with Nathan Fielder about Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes that just took the Telluride Film Festival by storm, serves as a companion piece to this.
“You see how this looks, right?” Oppenheim seems to ask us at the end, but which time it’s impossible to see it any other way.
