It is the mid-2000s in the United States of America. There are terrorists abroad and predators at home. Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), a reporter with Dateline NBC heads up a special investigative segment, To Catch a Predator, which takes the nation, thirsty for vigilante justice, by storm. The network puts his show in a primetime slot, but in order to keep the national spotlight, Chris needs to chase bigger and bigger threats, leading him and the crew to Denton, TX, in pursuit of his white whale.
Lance Oppenheim directs the buzzy biopic, Primetime, based on Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire expose, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” here adapted by screenwriter Ajon Singh. The 110-minute film debuted in competition at the 2026 edition of the Venice International Film Festival to largely positive acclaim; its primary suspect’s post-premiere antics notwithstanding. A24 rode that wave into a theatrical release shortly thereafter on over 2,800 screens.
The staticky blue title card welcomes us to the film, shot by cinematographer David Bolen in 1:50, evoking the feel of the early aughts television while still allowing for some cinematic imagery afforded by the extra space from a true 4:3. If anything, it all helps add to the sense that we are watching a facsimile; the store-bought cookies are not actually homemade, the encounters are not just innocent hangouts, and Chris Hansen may not be the suburban savior he has made himself out to be. Beyond just the frame size, the lighting is striking throughout, pulling out some of the most interesting shades of blues, reds, and greens, reminding us of that turn-of-the-century sense that our reality was in freefall and we frantically sought stability in our private lives that were quickly being brought online and projected worldwide. Beyond the evocations, editor Daniel Garber injects flashes of footage from the news and pop culture at the time to really drive home the sense of period.
Primetime properly opens with a deeply unsettling voiceover of Pattinson’s Hansen rehearsing his recitation of MarriedAndLookingForFun31313’s (Tony Revolori) explicit chat log with Del (Phoebe Bridgers), a decoy whom he thought was a minor that he was meeting for sex. Pattinson enters the scene, tossing aside a curtain and stepping onto the balcony with a flair and pageantry that we cannot help but chuckle at in our seats. Notably, he is playing the role with a deadly seriousness about it, not teetering into the realm of SNL impersonation where Hansen is blatantly being exploited for laughs, but rather, Oppenheim trusts that a modern audience some 25 years removed from Hansen’s first-run syndication will bring with them their modern sensibilities and let the absurdity of the too-real-to-be-true nature of the program speak for itself. That is not to say that Pattinson does not find some avenues to lean into some of the lighter bits, and while it may seem as if he is punching down on the real-life Hansen given that he is portraying him on screen, it is more a broad satire of the ego of the performer that is then filtered through Hansen’s specific story.
From there, the film cuts away to Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo). Once again, Bolen’s lens is in tight on period technology, this time, the SD viewfinder of a camcorder, pulling slowly out to reveal him sitting in a casting office. Beyond the predators encountered in the opening act of the film, if any character is overtly treated as a joke, it is Gisondo’s “Decoy Dan,” but in the same way that Singh treats his handling of Hansen as a satire on performance, that same idea is extended to Dan. Dan is an actor trying to make it big and absolutely over the moon about landing a role on this new, improvisational show. Gisondo plays the role with an earnest naivete that slowly allows audiences to warm to this lovable goofball, and without such a calculated performance, the crux of the third act of this film would fail to work.
Primetime posits that, while Chris Hansen did help to bring child predators into police custody, he himself was a predator ready to destroy the life of those around him on his own road to success. It is a pretty damning thesis, so it is no wonder that it was made without participation from the subject. It is also a thesis that, while effective in its conclusion, gets lost in some of the superfluous details along the way. These details all slowly begin to build up Hansen’s off-screen persona – his strained marriage to Mary (Anna Faris), a tabloid-tipped-off affair with Krysten (Caroline Hebert), the ungrateful working environment he creates that producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) must oversee – but as they come to a head in the final act, Pattinson’s performance loses its bite because Singh’s script neuters the character in a crowning moment of seeming defeat. The muted turn of the performance matches the page, so it is not truly fair to Pattinson, but rather a testament to the spark that he ignited across the first two acts that made such a wide-cast script feel tightly focused.
Singh shifts the script in two major ways in the third act. The first is the sudden move of the production to Texas after Xavier (Matthew Maher) – Hansen’s, to use a term, 9-year To Catch a Predator’s junior “catfish” – sinks the digital hook in inxs00 learning that he will be in Denton for a funeral, and further deducing that the man behind the screen name must be a government official as the only funeral in the area is that of a former senator. The second shift is the introduction of Hansen’s previous work with Dateline NBC that found him investigating a string of child disappearances across various villages in India at the hands of a mysterious evil, one which begins to personify itself in Texas as they continue to lure inxs00. This event – the sting operation and subsequent suicide at Bill Conradt’s (Alex Winter), the assistant district attorney of Rockwall County, compound – is also the capstone of David Osit’s documentary Predators (2025). While these events may be fresh in the minds of audiences, either from Osit’s handling of the subject matter or their own recollection of the highly publicized scandal that helped to mire the show’s reputation and led to its cancelation after only 20 episodes, Singh’s script is serviceable enough to keep chugging along even if the narrative weight has slowed its pace from how things started when Hansen was more organically at the top of the charts.
The narrative interest in this act also shifts in a way that shows, in a tragically fascinating way, the total commitment/corruption of Andie as she works to adhere cameras to the SWAT team’s guns and brainstorms on the fly so that Hansen can secure his interview for the show. Elsewhere in a car parked not far from the compound, Dan finds himself at a moral crisis as he speaks to Bill over the phone, being asked not with words but simply by the gravity of the situation, to show nuanced bedside manner for a man facing his ultimate humiliation and demise being turned into entertainment for the nation. Some cheeky screenwriting brings back some character moments for Dan that are, ultimately, a little too cute for the moment, but Gisondo wraps up his penultimate scene with stride. A gun goes off. A window is stained red. But has the monster truly been vanquished, or has he snuck away in the midst of all this chaos?
That is not a question which Primetime ever answers, choosing to spend its final moments instead in a sliver of glory for Dan, who, living in a way we are led to believe is reclusive, receives his SAG membership card in the mail. Without even a closing title card to try and contextualize this final act, the film cuts to the credits with Bridgers’ own original song for the film “On Video” playing out over the speakers. There is no mention that many of the predators who were apprehended as part of the program were ultimately released on account of Hansen’s miscarriage of justice. Without a concluding statement, we leave the film a little confused as to what the actual point of this whole endeavor was. While we can appreciate that Singh allowed the characters in Hansen’s orbit their own arcs to follow, as the primary subject of the biopic, we come away with an overall feeling of ambivalence, not leaning too strongly one way or another with him. This lack of conviction is frustrating, to say the least, especially after such a strong first two acts, but the film fizzles out into a soft examination of the crossing of celebrity and the news cycle that never actually makes a firm stand. Sure, we can come to our own conclusions, but with a background in documentary filmmaking, this softball landing by Oppenheim is a real disappointment. There is thankfully lots of craft to admire across the film’s runtime, which, to give credit where it is due, Oppenheim coordinates, but he leads the film seemingly without any true narrative or thematic goals in mind, letting his subject off any kind of hook he may have sought to entrap them in. To be clear, Primetime is not a savory portrayal of Hansen, but it arrives at that through highlighting his buffoonery off-screen more so than using his actual tarnished legacy as an argument against his saviorism. To be generous, perhaps Oppenheim sought to ignite that sense of exasperation and nihilism in his audience, but if that truly is the case, he needed to rehearse a bit more in the mirror to make sure he was getting it perfectly, sickeningly right.
