‘Primetime’ Review: Robert Pattinson Is Even Creepier Than IRL Chris Hansen in a Bleakly Invigorating ‘To Catch a Predator’ Thriller

Robert Pattinson is a freaky freak from frame one of Lance Oppenheim’s reality-TV thriller “Primetime,” in which the English actor stars as beleaguered American TV host Chris Hansen of “To Catch a Predator” fame. That means there’s nowhere to go and almost no arc from beginning to end, but that doesn’t make the results of this scuzzy satire any less bleakly invigorating. Pattinson has made oddballs, nutcases, and psychosexually damaged neurotics his calling card in his recent years. Even in a comic book movie like “The Batman,” something is always off, and his nonclassical handsomeness lends a jagged silhouette to characters you often want to like on their head, but should never trust.

Oppenheim directs him as a funhouse mirror version of the broadcast journalist and former “Dateline NBC” correspondent who spun a weekly segment of televised, candid-camera-style spin operations into “To Catch a Predator,” which aired from 2004 to 2007. The idea was to use underage-looking adults to lure alleged child sex offenders into a home, usually in a flyover city in states from Florida to Texas, with humiliation and entrapment the main ingredients. The audience became complicit, and couldn’t stop watching.

In “Primetime,” with its tweaked-out style and sleazy/douchey vibe of early-2000s videotape and closed circuit four-quadrant TV, Hansen (Pattinson) leads an ad hoc operation collectively known as Perverted-Justice. His right arm is Andie Bender (Merritt Wever, chillingly and coolly channeling Faye Dunaway in “Network”), self-described as the kind of producer “who doesn’t do well with feel-good stuff.”

Their dispatchers use screen names like MarriedAndLookingForFun31313 (Tony Revolori) and MarriedAndLookingForFun31313 (Jonathan Lipnicki) to send sexually explicit messages to possible offenders, and then send in decoys like Del (Phoebe Bridgers, the folk singer/songwriter making her acting debut) and Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) who affect their voices and physical carriage to resemble children. Once the unsuspecting men are, say, full-frontal naked with a can of whipped cream in their hands, that’s when the “kids” step aside, and Hansen sidles in: “Why don’t you have a seat over here.” Cue a video crew and law enforcement pinning the candid-camera victims to the ground as they’re reduced to tears.

Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh adapt an Esquire expose published in 2007 after the suicide of Bill Conradt, a Dallas-Ft. Worth district attorney who shot himself not far off-camera as the operation zeroed in on him. “Primetime” moves at the propulsive pace of a thriller, but has the style of an arthouse horror movie at its squirmiest. Documentary filmmaker Oppenheim (“Ren Faire,” “Spermworld”) deploys an arsenal of retro-period cinematic affectation, having tracked down the original DV cameras used for the show, shooting digitally and then scanning the footage to 16mm. Hidden cameras are rigged around set, and actual “Primetime” crew members form the backdrop of production staff swarming on the “To Catch a Predator” set. What would constitute “realism” here is churned through a nightmarish uncanny, with a patina so grimy that by the end of the movie, you feel as if you haven’t changed your clothes or showered in a few days.

‘Primetime’

That exuberance of the direction is the primary allure of “Primetime,” and how’s this for realism: former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Zucker, who’s never acted a day in his life, plays himself, self-loathingly directing Hansen and his team from afar into ever-worsening heights of sensationalism for the sake of beating out J.J. Abrams’ “Lost” in the weekly ratings. Hansen here believes himself to be some kind of avenging vigilante, convinced what he’s doing is “saving children.”

Casting Pattinson in the role leaves little to the imagination, as the IRL Hansen’s more equanimous, jovially unflappable, everyday demeanor is replaced here by someone who’s visibly diseased in the head from the very top. His marriage (to Anna Faris) and his children are but an adornment, so when the National Enquirer starts making threats to publicly expose Hansen’s affair with a younger (albeit only 30-year-old) woman, it’s hard to parse on this movie’s terms what he’s so freaked out about. “Primetime” tips toward an element of the probingly contradictory and deep when Hansen searches his name on the National Enquirer’s webpage, only to find zero results. He’s both relieved and disappointed. Here is a man who needs attention, good or bad, for oxygen. Hot off David Osit’s harrowing “Predators” documentary from last year, “Primetime” lacks for explicitly new insight, but it won’t stop digging for it.

Pattinson sure is scary, though, at one point framed with a Kubrick stare but here with his head and eyes tilted downward as a river of rain washes over a window and down on the night. Meanwhile, Hansen is closing in on his white “whale” — a rumored-to-be high-up, maybe NSA or CIA, possible offender, who turns out to be Conradt. The ensemble is equally strong, especially Wever and a cameo from Jessica Hecht as an acid-tainted rival news producer looking to poach her. The freckle-faced, admittedly “nubile”-looking (one of the Perverted-Justice member’s words, not mine) Gisondo imbues a layered sadness into the film, as he’s playing an aspiring SAG actor now thrust into the worst and darkest role of his life. It starts to turn him on, and even into a mini-Hansen.

Everyone’s souls here are sick at the roots, as is the camera, the editing, the production design, the movie itself. “Primetime” reveals Hansen as a creation not only of himself and the character he wanted to play, but also as created by everyone around him, and by us, the people watching at home. It’s just that the movie already starts with the transformation more or less complete and Hansen’s sordid personality baked in. But this isn’t a documentary trying to capture reality. It’s a movie — garishly monstrous, grotesque, and compulsively entertaining. Just like a certain “documentary” TV show.

Grade: B

“Primetime” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. A24 opens the film in theaters on September 25.