Primetime (2026) Review
All TV is, to a certain degree, exploitive—but that goes double for reality TV. With its notorious history of unsafe working conditions, crew abuse, and turning people’s real struggle into entertainment, it’s no wonder the genre exploded in the early 2000s, just as the post-9/11 surveillance state was rising to prominence. One of the earliest drivers of this trend was To Catch a Predator. Because the crimes depicted in this show are so stomach-turning, many worried that Lance Oppenheim would struggle to navigate so much nuance in his narrative feature debut. Thankfully, we were wrong. Dramatizing the dark unraveling of NBC’s hit investigative series, Primetime is a film about the dangers of ambition, fame, and entertainment.
I think the hardest part about this film is that two things can be true at once: the men caught committing these acts are monsters, but, also, Chris Hansen is a self-obsessed career climber. The film does a great job of showing this without excusing or trying to pathologize the predators. Hansen’s narcissism is obvious when he starts practicing lines before revealing himself, or when he wakes his kids in the middle of the night and shows them his latest episode, even if it’s wildly inappropriate for their age. The naked ambition of Hansen inevitably gives way to a kind of darkness that I think the film’s visuals do a great job of accentuating.
Much of the film is shot to look like it comes directly from 2007, and something about the grainy, haze-like texture of vintage DV cameras creates a ghostly quality in the image that enhances the more surreal and expressionistic scenes as Hansen begins to unravel under the pressure of his newfound fame. This look also builds in a kind of sweaty grit that’s reminiscent of many great 70s thrillers, which grounds us in the script’s more observational elements. There’s a great use of security footage that also heightens our sense of paranoia, allowing us to understand how the characters feel knowing they’re constantly being watched. The sound design does a great job of building our sense of the characters’ psychology, with sound funneling in and out, being distorted and reshaped as each person spirals out of control. Visual motifs of screens, reflections and windows also lend weight to the film’s discussion around the entertainment industry’s slimy underbelly, though the film’s visual language is often saying more than the script knows what to do with.
One of the bigger surprises of the film is how little screen time Pattinson gets. His character is still undoubtedly the protagonist, but the lengthy detours taken to follow a decoy actor or the show's producer create narrative threads that sometimes obscure the more interesting parts of the story. Despite the film mostly doing a great job of not making its concerns overly accessible, I actually think the portions where we pull away from Hansen’s character to instead follow his decoy actor place the concerns around fame and performance a little too close to the foreground, making the film clunkier and more heavy-handed than it needs to be. Even still, the uneven pacing is rarely enough to derail the film thanks in large part to performances that are so embodied and committed that they keep those detours compelling.
Pattinson gives the performance of his career in this film. He’s always known to go for the stranger line deliveries, and I think that risk largely pays off with this character. He’s able to communicate so much with his eyes that, despite the sleazy TV smile, we can tell Hansen is starting to crack. Skyler Gisondo is another standout; he’s mentioned his nervousness about acting with Pattinson bled into this performance, and I think that vulnerability does a lot for his character. It helps us understand how big a break this is for his Dan, and why he would continue working a job that’s clearly traumatizing him. Merritt Wever is also a convincing producer, trying to hold together a show and cast that is clearly falling apart. Combined, each character provides a different insight into just how morally bankrupt the TV industry, and the culture that produces such an industry, really is.
Despite it being set in 2006-2007, this is a movie that feels tailored to modern America. The proliferation of social media platforms has turned us all into mini-Hansens, carefully curating ourselves through a digital filter while sifting through the lives of others. The inclusion of newsreels relishing in the idea that Saddam Hussein will ‘get what he deserves’ reflects a blending of the news and entertainment that seems to have only gotten worse in the years since. In this way, I appreciate how the film not only critiques the entertainment industry, but also implicates those of us who sit at home watching.
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