Robert Pattinson plays To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen as an increasingly obsessed ratings hunter in Lance Oppenheim’s grim and unsettling new film.
There is something deeply uncomfortable about watching Robert Pattinson stare into a camera while rehearsing the words of men who believe they are speaking to children.
That discomfort is exactly where Primetime wants to live.
Lance Oppenheim’s first narrative feature turns the controversial NBC series To Catch a Predator into a feverish character study about television, public humiliation and the pursuit of ratings. Pattinson plays real-life host Chris Hansen, but this is not a straightforward recreation of the television phenomenon.
Instead, the film is interested in what happens when a man who believes he is delivering justice becomes increasingly consumed by the power and attention that come with it.
Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen
Pattinson gives Hansen an unsettling intensity.
He copies the broadcaster’s mannerisms and carefully rehearsed delivery, while making the character increasingly arrogant, obsessive and detached from the consequences of his work.
The film repeatedly puts Pattinson’s face extremely close to the camera. Its cramped 4:3 framing and grimy visual style make Hansen appear less like a conventional television journalist and more like the central figure in a psychological horror film.
Hansen is already established as a ratings-driven personality when the story begins.
In 2006, NBC executive Jeff Zucker calls Hansen and producer Andie Bender into his office. To Catch a Predator, previously part of Dateline NBC, is being moved into primetime because audiences cannot get enough of it.
The move also puts the program into direct competition with ABC’s Lost.
For Hansen, the ratings battle quickly becomes personal.
What is Primetime about?
The film fictionalizes the real-world operation behind To Catch a Predator, in which decoys posed as underage children online and confronted adults who arrived expecting to meet them.
The targets were genuine sex offenders, but the methods used to lure and expose them raise questions about the boundary between journalism, entertainment and law enforcement.
That ethical tension sits at the centre of Primetime.
Hansen presents himself as a protector of children and a crusader against sexual predators. Yet the film increasingly shows how much he enjoys the spectacle of the confrontation.
One early sequence has him studying footage of suspects reacting when he suddenly appears during a sting. He wants the cameras closer because he believes viewers will want to see every expression.
The show becomes less about simply exposing offenders and more about producing television.
The sting operations
One of the film’s early operations follows a nervous former Marine played by Tony Revolori.
The man arrives at a house expecting to meet Del, a decoy played by Phoebe Bridgers who is pretending to be 13.
Before Hansen enters, Del leaves the room under a prearranged excuse.
Hansen then makes his dramatic appearance, repeating the man’s own online messages back to him.
Outside, police are waiting to make an arrest.
The operation depends on several people working together.
Producer Andie Bender, played by Merritt Wever, watches the action through monitors inside a nearby production van.
Matthew Maher plays Xavier Von Erck, the real-life founder of Perverted Justice, the group that helped identify and lure potential offenders by posing as minors online.
The film also introduces Dan Plum, played by Skyler Gisondo, a young aspiring actor recruited as a decoy.
Dan initially sees the work as a chance to become part of something important. Hansen encourages that belief, presenting him as a kind of superhero protecting children.
But Dan gradually discovers how different the reality is from the heroic image Hansen has created.
Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo stand out
Pattinson dominates the film, but the supporting cast gives Primetime much of its tension.
Wever’s Andie is ambitious, sharp and increasingly frustrated by Hansen’s behaviour. She helps operate the machine even as his decisions become harder to defend.
Their relationship changes as Hansen begins making decisions without consulting her, including relocating shoots and driving production costs higher.
Gisondo’s Dan provides another perspective on the show’s manufactured reality.
He wants to act, but finds himself performing a very different kind of role as an underage decoy.
Bridgers, making a striking acting debut, plays Del with a quiet confidence. Her character treats the decoy work as a form of activism and is capable of switching between the mannerisms and voice of a girl and a boy when the operation requires it.
The film’s ensemble also includes Alex Winter, Bokeem Woodbine, Jonathan Lipnicki and Jeff Zucker playing himself.
Anna Faris appears as Hansen’s wife, while Caroline Hebert plays Krysten, the woman with whom Hansen is having an affair.
Hansen’s private life starts falling apart
While Hansen’s television profile grows, his personal life deteriorates.
His marriage is in trouble, and the National Enquirer obtains photographs that could expose his affair.
At the same time, Andie is being pursued by a rival network, while Dan struggles to reconcile his acting ambitions with his role on the show.
Hansen’s obsession with beating Lost becomes another source of pressure.
When he learns that a politically significant target may have been caught by the show’s decoy operation in Texas, he becomes determined to pursue the story.
The target becomes what the film calls a potential “whale” — a high-profile catch that could deliver the kind of television moment Hansen wants.
The Bill Conradt tragedy
The film eventually reaches the real-life incident that became one of the darkest episodes associated with To Catch a Predator.
Bill Conradt, a Rockwall County, Texas, assistant district attorney, was confronted after communicating with a Perverted Justice volunteer posing as a 13-year-old boy.
As a SWAT team moved in, Conradt fatally shot himself.
The film depicts the event as a major turning point.
Andie pushes hesitant Texas police officers toward action while Hansen sees the developing situation as television history.
After Conradt dies, Andie says she can use what happened.
The sequence pushes Primetime‘s central ethical conflict into the foreground: at what point does a television investigation stop documenting an event and start influencing it?
A darker version of television justice
The movie repeatedly blurs the line between journalism and performance.
Hansen believes he is exposing dangerous people, but his methods increasingly resemble those of an entertainer chasing the biggest possible audience.
The film connects his ambition to the older tradition of public humiliation, presenting television as a modern version of the public pillory.
Pattinson’s performance makes that idea particularly uncomfortable.
His Hansen is not simply a corrupt journalist or a conventional villain. He genuinely appears to believe in the importance of his mission while becoming increasingly addicted to the attention it brings him.
That contradiction gives the character his strongest moments.
How does Primetime compare with Predators?
The film is not the first recent examination of To Catch a Predator.
David Osit’s 2025 documentary Predators explored the same television phenomenon and its wider implications.
That comparison exposes one of Primetime‘s limitations.
Where Predators examines the broader culture surrounding the show, Oppenheim’s film stays tightly focused on Hansen and his psychological deterioration.
The result is more stylized and theatrical, but also narrower.
Primetime raises questions about public shaming, televised justice and the audience’s appetite for humiliation without always developing those ideas beyond the surface.
Its strongest material comes from watching the characters rather than listening to the film explain its own argument.
A horror movie disguised as a media drama
Oppenheim uses the visual language of exploitation cinema to tell the story.
Cinematographer David Bolen gives the film a grainy, saturated appearance, while the 4:3 image keeps the characters boxed into the frame.
Daniel Garber’s editing frequently creates unexpected connections between the characters and the television machinery surrounding them.
Ari Balouzian’s score adds another layer of unease, with a throbbing sound that makes even ordinary production moments feel threatening.
The approach could easily have become unbearable.
Instead, the performances keep the film watchable, particularly Pattinson’s increasingly unnerving interpretation of Hansen.
Does Primetime work?
As a conventional investigation into To Catch a Predator, Primetime leaves gaps.
It does not attempt to explain the entire history of the program or fully examine why the television phenomenon became so successful.
It is more interested in Hansen’s hunger for recognition and the way that hunger changes the people around him.
That makes it an uncomfortable character study rather than a definitive account of the real-life show.
Pattinson is the main reason it works.
He turns Hansen into a strange mixture of television professional, vigilante and performer, while Wever, Gisondo and Bridgers give the film a strong supporting core.
The result is entertaining in a deliberately unpleasant way.
Primetime does not make To Catch a Predator look cleaner with the passage of time. If anything, it makes the machinery behind the spectacle look even more disturbing.
