Primetime Review: Robert Pattinson Is Chillingly Good as Chris Hansen

If you were anywhere near a television in the mid-2000s, you knew the line before the man even finished it. “Why don’t you take a seat?” Chris Hansen turned four words into a cultural moment, and To Catch a Predator turned public humiliation into primetime television. Twenty years later, A24 is asking a pointed question: what did it actually take to make that show a hit?

Primetime is director Lance Oppenheim’s first scripted feature after a run of acclaimed documentaries, and it’s a strange, tense watch. It doesn’t want you to feel good about any of this. It mostly succeeds.

What’s It About

Set in 2006, the film follows a fictionalized Chris Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson, during the early rise of To Catch a Predator. Hansen wants more than a ratings hit. He wants respect. He’s jealous of his more prestigious Dateline colleagues, and he sees this sting show as his ticket to something bigger, especially once NBC slots it against Lost.

Behind him is producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), the person actually running the operation — booking the decoy houses, managing the volunteer activist group setting the traps, holding the whole enterprise together while quietly wondering what it’s doing to her. New to the team is Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), a young actor Hansen nicknames “Decoy” Dan, who genuinely believes he’s helping keep kids safe rather than working a sleazy reality show built on public shame.

The Primetime Movie Review

Pattinson is the reason to watch this movie, full stop. His Hansen is a man built entirely out of rehearsed lines and practiced facial expressions, so polished he seems to have lost track of which parts of himself are real. He’s cheating on his wife, barely present for his kids, and constantly chasing a kind of validation that no amount of ratings can actually give him. It’s a big, committed performance, and it should put Pattinson near the front of the awards conversation this year.

The film’s smartest choice is in what it refuses to do. It doesn’t pretend the men caught on camera are sympathetic. They’re not. They showed up looking to meet a child. The film knows that, and it doesn’t ask you to feel sorry for them. What it does ask is a harder question: even when someone deserves what’s coming to them, should the rest of us be enjoying the show? Is public humiliation actually justice, or just better television?

That tension runs through the whole film, and it’s most effective in the smaller, quieter beats — the “found family” dynamic that forms between Hansen, Andie, and Dan, three people bound together by a job none of them can fully justify to themselves. Gisondo, in particular, brings a genuine, heartbreaking naivety to Dan that makes the whole enterprise feel even more uncomfortable to watch.

Where the Film Struggles

Not every critic has walked away convinced Primetime earns its bigger swings. Some have pointed out that the film moves fast enough that it never quite digs beneath the show’s surface-level sensationalism, staying more interested in style than in real psychological depth. It’s a fair critique. Visually, the film leans hard into a VHS-tape haze — grainy, close, over-lit in that motel-neon way — which suits the tabloid subject matter but occasionally feels more like a mood board than a fully worked-out point of view.

The attempt to reframe Hansen’s morality doesn’t always land, either. A philandering, ratings-obsessed TV host being the one asking “what would have happened if I wasn’t here?” is a complicated needle to thread, and the film doesn’t always thread it. It’s clearly not trying to excuse him. But it does spend a lot of energy on Hansen’s ego without spending nearly as much on the actual victims of the crimes his show was built around.

A Word of Caution

This isn’t a comfortable movie, and it isn’t supposed to be. The subject matter — predatory behavior toward minors, and a television industry eager to turn that into entertainment — is handled without gratuitousness, but it’s still heavy, unrelenting material. If you found the real To Catch a Predator hard to stomach, this fictionalized version won’t be an easier watch.

The Verdict

Primetime is a sharp, well-acted, deeply uncomfortable piece of filmmaking that asks fair questions about the ethics of true-crime entertainment without fully answering them. Pattinson’s performance alone makes it worth the price of admission. Just know what you’re walking into.

Rating: 3.5/5

Watch the Trailer

Quick Facts

• Title: Primetime
• Director: Lance Oppenheim
• Writer: Ajon Singh
• Genre: Drama
• Runtime: 110 minutes
• Starring: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Matthew Maher
• Distributor: A24
• World premiere: Venice Film Festival 2026 (Main Competition)
• US release date: September 25, 2026

Where to Watch

Primetime opens in US theaters nationwide on September 25, 2026, via A24. UK audiences can catch it starting October 30, 2026.

Final Thoughts

Primetime doesn’t let anyone off easy — not Chris Hansen, not the network that built a hit show around him, and not the audience that ate it up. It’s an uneasy, well-acted piece of work that’s more interested in asking questions than answering them, and it’s worth watching precisely because it doesn’t try to make you feel comfortable about it.

Have you seen “Primetime”? Share your thoughts in the comments below.