‘Primetime’ Review: Robert Pattinson Turns America’s Favorite Vigilante Into a Monster of His Own Making

‘Primetime‘ drops you into a Florida living room in 2006, where a hidden camera crew waits for a man who thinks he is meeting a teenager. That setup alone tells you almost everything about the world this film wants to live in, a world of stings, hidden lenses, and the particular American appetite for watching bad men get caught on camera. Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, the real life Dateline NBC host who turned ‘To Catch a Predator’ into a cultural phenomenon, and the film treats his rise less as a biography than as a slow motion unraveling.

Director Lance Oppenheim, working here on his first narrative feature after a run of documentaries, brings a chopped up, feverish visual style that mimics the grain and unease of early 2000s cable television. The film does not sit you comfortably outside the operation looking in, it puts you in the room with the producers, the decoys, and the cameras, and lets the moral queasiness build scene by scene. Merritt Wever plays the network producer constantly recalculating how far the show can push for ratings, while Skyler Gisondo plays a decoy chasing his union card without fully grasping what the job will cost him.

What struck me most is how the film refuses to let Hansen be a hero or a villain in any tidy sense. Pattinson plays him as a man who has learned exactly which words make a predator sound righteous, and somewhere along the way stopped being able to tell the difference between saving children and saving his own spotlight. It is a performance built on control, the kind where a raised eyebrow does more work than a monologue, and it carries the film through stretches where the plotting itself grows thinner than the atmosphere around it.

The back half is where my enthusiasm cooled slightly. The opening hour crackles with tension and dark comedy, the sense that you are watching an institution invent its own worst impulses in real time, but once the show’s fame becomes the actual subject, the film starts circling ideas it has already made rather than pushing them further. There is a late detour into Hansen’s personal mythology, an attempt to explain the psychological wiring behind his crusade, that feels more like genre flourish than insight, and it is the one place where the film seems unsure whether it wants to indict its subject or simply marvel at him.

Anna Faris gets a handful of scenes as Hansen’s wife that suggest a whole other movie about what it costs the people orbiting a man chasing fame, and I wished the film had trusted her more. Phoebe Bridgers, in a rare acting turn as one of the show’s chameleon decoys, brings a quiet unease to her scenes that the film could have used more of elsewhere. These are the moments where ‘Primetime’ hints at a richer, sadder story sitting just beneath its satire, one about how easily a public service can curdle into spectacle without anyone involved admitting it happened.

Even with those reservations, this is a film that stays with you, mostly because Pattinson refuses to let Hansen off the hook even when the script threatens to. Watching him modulate that mix of charisma and vacancy is the reason to see ‘Primetime’, and it is a performance I expect to be talking about well past this awards season. The satire is sharp enough to sting without ever tipping into cartoonish outrage, and that balance is harder to pull off than the film makes it look.

‘Primetime’ is a stylish, unsettling piece of work that occasionally loses its footing in its second half but never loses its nerve, anchored by a lead performance that is genuinely one of the best of the year. I am landing on 9 out of 10, docking a point for a third act that trades psychological clarity for genre flourish, but this is still one of the most purely engrossing films A24 has put out this year.

Have you seen ‘Primetime’ yet, and does Pattinson’s performance hit you the same way it hit me? Drop your take in the comments.