Primetime (Photo – A24)
Before watching Primetime, make sure your water bill is paid up. You might want to take a long shower.
Primetime
Directed by Lance Oppenheim – 2026
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
Based on the ill-fated, real-life NBC series To Catch a Predator, which debuted in 2006, the film stars Robert Pattinson as “investigative reporter” Chris Hansen, who confronts men seeking sex and lured to apartments booby-trapped with hidden cameras and side rooms. In the opening scene, Hansen emerges from one of them to confront an arrival before he is pounced on by police and dragged away to ignominy.
Produced by edgy-film specialist A24, Primetime is full of horror-movie tricks: blurred images, jarring angles, and security cameras with an unblinking predator’s gaze. A desolate sense of cinéma vérité often predominates.
Forget any sense of Primetime “rising above its material.” The protagonist, Hansen, is a go-getter who, when asked by a fellow airplane passenger, “Don’t you just want to bleed them?”—meaning the men he traps—replies gleefully that he bleeds them in other ways. And while he catches predators, he is also involved in an extramarital affair, being privately dogged by a camera-clicking National Enquirer sleuth: the hunter being hunted. As if to second his own moral failings, he is shown rousing his two young sons from their sleep to show them the clip of an exposed predator groveling pathetically before being led off.
Hansen’s ambition is itself almost pathological, or certainly delusional. As one TV technician mutters to another, “He thinks he’s f—ing Mike Wallace.” A recurring motif of NBC reporter Stone Phillips doing substantial stuff shows Hansen what he is and what he never will be.
“Who gave you permission?” one client—a rabbi, no less—roars at Hansen at the moment of confrontation. I almost had sympathy for him, especially when this was preceded by a montage of lonely, damaged men arriving to greet “Decoy Dan,” as he is called, before their arrest. One thinks they need help, not shaming.
As well played by Skyler Gisondo, “Decoy Dan” Plumb is a 23-year-old pretending to be thirteen, all in an attempt to get a SAG card: another kind of desperation, much like a later attempt to entrap a VIP.
Primetime is not a bad film. For what it is, it is done well; it’s just that films like Network—which long ago explored TV’s hunger for ratings—and Nightcrawler—which explored the sleazy side of photojournalism—did the same thing, only better. And while it’s unfair to compare Primetime to a classic film like Midnight Cowboy, I recall how that film ended with the hint that its hero would rise up from the muck. Primetime offers no such comfort. Maybe that’s not the film’s fault, but the fault of the times in which we live.
> Playing at Regal Paseo, Regency Academy Cinemas, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, AMC Santa Anita 16, and LOOK Dine-In Cinemas.
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