Given Lance Oppenheim’s background in documentaries, one would be forgiven for expecting his new Chris Hansen biopic, Primetime, to hew to a naturalism akin to his usual form. It may be a starry feature film, but surely it will be grounded in an unimpeachable nonfiction aesthetic, maybe even combining real footage with recreations and erasing distinctions between the two.
But beyond the stunt casting of NBC honcho Jeff Zucker playing himself — an Easter egg that only TV insiders will uncover — Oppenheim’s fever dream of a feature debut couldn’t be further from the hallowed strictures of docufiction, for better or worse. Observable reality, such as it exists in the claustrophobic closeups and hidden-camera voyeurism of the movie’s opening third, crumbles like Hansen’s brittle psyche by the midway point. Gradually, inexorably, an inside baseball account of one of television’s most controversial reality series becomes a phantasmagoric descent into a suburban hellscape. Replete with oversaturated colors and spirals of psychedelic fantasy, it feels like an Aaron Sorkin film hijacked by Darren Aronofksy. I’m still not sure if it fully “works,” but I could not look away for a single frame of its 110 minutes.
Robert Pattinson wears Hansen like a cheap suit, portraying his smug protagonist as a petulant striver with an insufferable savior complex. Primetime opens in Long Beach in 2006, amid a sting operation for his series, To Catch a Predator, intercutting between grainy cameras angled from ceilings and the focused eyes of his producers, squirreled away in a makeshift control room. One of the series’ “decoys” — an actor paid to impersonate the look and mannerisms of an underage boy or girl — has “invited” a real adult to their house for sex (the online chats were actually written by a To Catch a Predator staffer). As soon as the mark enters the premises, the “child” disappears, and Hansen emerges, in this case literally from behind a second-floor curtain. He’s a superhero with perfect hair, his weapon a damning script of the would-be pedophile’s chat log.
Scenes like these are, more or less, what we expect from Primetime, and Oppenheim, with his writer Ajon Singh, includes several of them, dividing their perspectives between Hansen and Dan Plumb (masterfully played by Skyler Gisondo), an actor and musical-theater aspirant who lands a job as a To Catch a Predator decoy in hopes of adding to his reel. Primetime’s plot, which hangs on by a tenuous thread, involves NBC’s decision to move the series from its late-night ghetto into the cherished 9 p.m. time slot, opposite ABC’s Lost. With that promotion comes an expectation to outdo even the most lurid stings of previous seasons. As Hansen grows increasingly desperate for the sort of content (using today’s terminology) that will affix eyeballs to his tawdry gotcha journalism, he also finds himself, in a savory irony, captured by the hidden camera of a National Enquirer paparazzo after dining with his paramour, which further strains his already collapsing marriage.
One could think of the film as an opera of sorts. The score, by Ari Balouzian, is present almost constantly, undergirding and cueing and commenting on the dark and sometimes frenzied action. Were a character to start singing their feelings, it would not be altogether jarring, and operatic story elements — emotional breakdowns, betrayals, a climactic death — appear in spades.
There is a tradeoff, of course, in Oppenheim’s decision to lean into such creative license. Primetime loses the plot, figuratively and otherwise. For a much more thoroughgoing, fact-based account of To Catch a Predator and its rippling impact on our culture, David Osit’s brilliant and prismatic documentary Predators (2025) is your destination. It is an essential watch prior to Primetime, probing ethical questions and exposing traumas that Primetime largely leaves on the table.
It might be best, then, to think of Primetime as the wild companion piece to Predators, the latter driven by sober reportage, the former by unhinged parable. I prefer Predators’ approach, but perhaps Primetime’s self-conscious artifice is, in and of itself, the point. For all the kudos Hansen receives from strangers throughout Primetime — he’s doing the Lord’s work, and “cleansing the world of an ancient evil” — To Catch a Predator was an entrapment scheme that catered to Americans’ basest impulses. “You’re saving children,” an advocate assures Hansen, even if said children are, in To Catch a Predator’s hall of mirrors, an invention. If there’s nothing faker than reality TV, then Primetime drops the mask altogether, flailing in the fraudulence.
PRIMETIME. Director: Lance Oppenheim, Cast: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher, Anna Faris, Phoebe Bridgers, Bokeem Woodbine, Distributor: A24, Rated R. Now playing at most area theaters