PRIMETIME
2026
Directed by Lance Oppenheim
Written by Ajon Singh (based on the article "Tonight On Dateline This Man Will Die" by Luke Dittrich)
This appears to be a fringe opinion, but if you were to ask me, and implicitly you are, Primetime kind of doesn't work. Only kind of: it works as a motion picture substantially better than it does as a cohesive narrative drama—though it also works as a system of images substantially better than it does as what someone might mean by the term "motion picture," even when they've made it clear they don't care very much about plot, so "kind of doesn't work" is what we're going to be going with. I think the easiest way to understand why it doesn't is to look at its genesis, and then realize it doesn't really have one, because it has two. On one trajectory came its director, Lance Oppenheim, a documentarian considering making his narrative feature film debut who'd lately fallen in with producer and (eventually) star Robert Pattinson, and Oppenheim recounts his part of Primetime's genesis as a strange encounter he'd had with Chris Hansen, the journalist/vigilante who headlined the To Catch a Predator series that aired within Dateline NBC from 2004-2007. There could, therefore, be worse encounters with Chris Hansen, but what happened was that Oppenheim's wife had, apropos of I assume very little, bought her husband a Cameo greeting from the journalist, an experience Oppenheim evidently found extraordinarily bizarre coming from Hansen's brand of celebrity, especially as he looked at other ones Hansen had done which, for instance, made child sex abuse-related puns, the example Oppenheim's given of this not being as miserably tasteless as it could've been, I guess, but it's hard to imagine that such a thing as that would be tasteful. Oppenheim was fascinated with what kind of weird fame vampire would do this, and what cultural process might have created him and then viralized him into a household name, making him, I think we have to acknowledge, one of the most notable (or notorious) journalists of the 21st century. I mean, I myself have exactly zero firsthand experience with Predator (the show struck me in its day, and not to get ahead of our skis here, still strikes me, as simultaneously sleazy and boring), but if you asked me to name a 21st century journalist, Hansen would have been one of the first people who came to mind, even before I'd ever heard of this movie.
However, on a second trajectory was Ajon Singh, Primetime's screenwriter, who collided with Oppenheim while he and Pattinson were just shuffling through scripts looking for a project to work on together, and while the synchronicity seems to have fixed Oppenheim's attention and Oppenheim developed that script after he and Pattinson bought it, the ideas Oppenheim seems to have had about a biopic of Hansen just are not the ideas that Singh had, Singh having determined that his "in" to the matter of Hansen would be more psychological than sociological, and indeed more of an experiential thriller putting a movie character named "Hansen" through his paces, and perhaps, given the credit duly extended to the Luke Dittrich article, more of a procedural patterned on a particular episode of Predator, though I wouldn't press this last claim too far. (If Singh did have his heart set on "a procedural," he certainly doesn't get one till about 70 minutes of Primetime's 104 minutes have gone by, which is how long it takes it to have anything akin to "a plot.") Still, while I accept that I could be entirely off-base about all of this, I'd probably have to judge Singh the victor of any tug-of-war that occurred here, the inexperienced screenwriter pulling the first-time narrative feature director more towards what he wanted, and Oppenheim having a good time rendering it anyway even if his avowed goals were never met.
So the film concerns the origin and predictable-in-all-ways flameout of the show about catfishing pedophiles and confronting them without warning with both public humiliation and (in ways that confuse me because I know the difference between a mens rea and an actus reus, but I guess must have some legal carveout) criminal arrest, covering all three years of its existence, albeit approximately two and a half years longer than the film is remotely designed to feel like. The show is headlined by Hansen (Pattinson having been eventually prevailed upon to offer his name to the film's marquee), and produced by Andie Bender (a fictional composite; Merritt Wever) with the hunting done by the founder of the preexisting Perverted-Justice vigilante group, Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher). As you probably know, what the show does is entice pedophiles into visiting a house rented by NBC so their exposure can be filmed and shown on television; it typically does this with a decoy, such as Del Harvey (Phoebe Bridgers), who is the bait for our first guest star (Tony Revolori).
I suggested above that I'm unclear how this stereotyped set-up made for good television after the first time, and it obviously wouldn't make for a good movie after the first time either, so to the extent Primetime has a story it's the story of Dan Plum (also a fictional composite; Skyler Gisondo), a young actor hoping to break through, who is hired by the show as a second decoy and despite being unaware of what the job entails even in its most basic respects is thrust into service on his first day showing up to "set" by a desperate production, so that within about sixty seconds of arriving, he's been sexually assaulted by a pedophile, and at this point you'll have to accept that the movie shall be willing to use cartoonish implausibility to get at what it's after, whatever that turns out to be. Despite this rough experience, Dan soon comes to admire Hansen, and then later comes to regret doing so, as a result mainly of the show's investigation into Bill Conradt (Bill S. Preston—esquire, even—himself, Alex Winter, a portrayal of, it's worth saying, enormous bravery and sensitivity given Winter's own life story). How that shakes out will not surprise you, I think, even if you didn't know how it ended as a matter of history.
There are, however, some small-scale and disproportionately-rewarding surprises to it, and I'm not as down on the movie as I might seem. I'm not as up on it as some, and to no small degree I feel like I was watching a different movie than some people had to have been. What this announces itself as, of course, is a hard-hitting critique of To Catch a Predator and especially Chris Hansen as a desperate freak in his own right, and I guess people are willing to roll with that framing and supply their own previously-held opinions on this particular human along with their own takes on the fraught and tiresome intertwined subjects of sex crime, vigilante justice, and surveillance spectacle, after which I expect they went back to doing exactly what they were doing before they watched the movie. Which is just as well because the movie has very little to say about whether Predator was good or bad or both or neither, arguably in a manner that opens up the space for you to come to your own conclusions about it (arguably in a manner that forgets that its interference sometimes redounded in its featured suspects' favor), but perhaps in a manner more like it didn't quite have any conclusions to make itself, insofar as from time to time it will very effortfully and never very productively attempt to make some points and draw some parallels. The one that initially struck me as ahistoric and even kind of stupid is, at least, the more artful—these are not necessarily antonyms—in its attempt to tie pedo-panic to post-9/11 paranoia by way of the war in Iraq contemporary with Hansen's show, including a cut from the trial of Saddam Hussein (himself) to a discussion of what ought to be done with a pedophile that is, simultaneously, superbly-done and apt to make you scoff a little, though a later, even more heavy-handed paraphrase of one of George W. Bush's more famous quotes, regarding stark black-and-white moral reasoning, comes genuinely close to working as an evocation of the mindset of the speaker; which still has nothing to do with Hansen as a fame-seeking, Cameo-mongering exploiter, but that's because little in the movie, besides a stray network meeting here and there, ever does. Instead, it'll kind of halfassedly try to make its Hansen into a hypocrite, because he's cheating on his wife (Anna Faris? for this?), and I find this borderline offensive, as a matter of clumsy thematics to be sure, but moreso as an immense waste of our time in the theater, just this constant intrusion of who-gives-a-shit material; with the utmost charity, the idea is to give Hansen a taste of what it's like to be hunted by tabloid newsmen, but, by the end, the movie has more-or-less admitted that it didn't have anything to do with anything, and even apologized for the interruptions.
The sociopathy is instead embodied almost solely in Wever's producer, even then more as a relieving buffer between other scenes in a movie that is, probably as much as a psychological thriller, a comedy—a very dark one, but I probably laughed at it as much as I would a lighter comedy—its best or at least wooziest material, which amounts to the same thing, being a runner (an actual runner, I'd daresay) that frames our 23 year-old tween decoy in an increasingly infantilized light under the care of his mommy producer and daddy star, with substantial attention given to what is positively being framed as "grooming" in its own right by the parental figures of his show. And I suppose it's funnier than I made it sound. Otherwise, the film not-infrequently manages to be a comedy with the sheer over-the-topness of how it's going about being a psychological thriller, which is where it runs afoul of not really having much of an idea of how to make a story out those psychological thrills, or having a psychology to refer to, though it's better at this than it is making an argument. It's essentially a creature of its two lead performances, one designed to badly overshadow the other in ways both beneficial and detrimental to it as an object. The overbearing one of those, obviously, arrives through Pattinson, who is showboating in a way that I ultimately have to approve of, despite my general sourness towards that actor, with a performance that's starting with an impression of Hansen but which becomes (I mean, really, simply is, beginning with his very first line, a creepily-mannered voiced-over recitation of an explicit chat transcript) a collection of weird, demented line reads and physical gestures; and in a movie that's actually supporting Pattinson's acting choices for a change, it's easy to go along for the ride with that, though the inaccessibility of the actor means it is hard-going to ever tie his character together into anything coherent, something he effectively asks you to do on your own time if you want, though it's not altogether unrewarding to do so. The short version is, it's a much better Batman performance than his actual Batman, in its array of surfaces barely joined-together evidently built more for the movie Oppenheim initially wanted to make about media venality, but eventually it's surrendering to the truth of the character that Singh wrote; and that Hansen, at least, really and truly fucking means it, and, in this light, those surfaces do finally cohere into a dark, glittering jewel of a man, unpleasant and cruel and driven by something almost (maybe literally!) supernatural, but by the same token not completely devoid of humanity (with one long close-up to prove it), and not a force you can simply dismiss as just another manifestation of phony showbiz greed.
Then there's Gisondo as Robin, and my general anti-Pattinson prejudice made me root for him, which would be easy enough anyway considering how much more appeal and openness he's offering as a substantially more real-feeling person, who also happens to be going through the closest thing Primetime has to a story. I'm ultimately unwilling to say he must be Primetime's MVP and everyone else must be a starfucker to not be talking at least as much about him, but I could paranoically loop that back around to anti-Pattinson sentiment if I wanted, considering that Gisondo has been anchored with the decisions made by his director and signed off on by his producer, who happens to be the person he's competing with as this movie's "lead" actor. Namely, this is whatever the fuck is happening when Gisondo is pretending to be a thirteen year old boy in 2007. (Bizarrely, Bridgers does a flawless "thirteen year old boy in 2007" vocal performance—neither one looks very much like one, though Bridgers obviously moreso, given that Gisondo, unpersuaively hiding behind his freckles, looks barely younger and in some lighting conditions that showcase his crow's feet does not look younger than his co-star—and other than Harvey's prickliness, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be leaning on Harvey every time as their go-to decoy kid.) I am prepared to accept the contention that there's some kind of real strategy at work here—suggesting that Dan is, actually, a bad actor; that his quarries are so driven by their compulsions that they are willing to fool themselves; maybe they're banking on the shock value of how, when Dan suddenly drops the affectation in the climax, to force a discussion regarding Rent, the stage show, and Rent, the Chris Columbus movie, to do a kindness to another person, and to keep himself from being overwhelmed by his own feelings of fright and grief, he actually does sound like a kid for the first time—but the "gee, Wally" inflections and dialogue Dan's taking on are pretty much always more distracting than they are useful, even in this movie so willing to pursue a joke amidst its ugly material, and for some reason it's just an annoyingly large part of Gisondo's otherwise-great performance. At least he gets to make up some ground during a key scene where Hansen has been incapacitated, where he gives his impression of Pattinson doing Hansen, though the inexplicability of why this scene happens in the first place brings us right back to the weakness of Primetime as a storytelling exercise.
And it is not a very strong one, but whether Oppenheim, as a filmmaker, was picking up its slack, or, more likely, if this is just what consumed all his attention, it more than makes do as something else. To some degree, I'd like to describe what it is as a succession of emotional states about the toll Predator took on its fictionalized principals, though this runs hard up against the quasi-problem of Pattinson quantum leaping between emotional states without tying them together and the actual-problem of Predator itself being a repetitive grind in its ordinary course of business so there often aren't really emotional states to be had (as noted, that's a problem the film only solves in its longeurs when it happens upon a more interesting predator and more interesting and complex predator-prey relationship). But what it's got in fucking spades is moodiness, thanks to Oppenheim and cinematographer David Bolen, and with the aggression of its imagery it has substantially solved its "is this even a dramatic narrative?" problems in the same way that last year's minor-sensation "movie about television," The Luckiest Man In America, did (and it is solving its "disjointed collection of ideas regarding a social horror" problem in ways that last year's surprisingly-similar-feeling gonzo football film, Him, didn't quite). It is not, meaningfully, "a movie that looks like TV": there is some minimal recreationism at work here, in the footage suggested to have been aired on NBC, and even on that count its colors bleed around in fucked-up ways thanks to the worn-out vintage equipment they used. But "looking like TV" was a starting place, and if "recreationism" might've been an initial goal—Bolen shot on 16mm that was then digitized, and Oppenheim evidently has some notion of 00s television as a wonderland of colorful pastels—the results are less like watching television, than having a nightmare about television. It pays off pretty much throughout, fuzzed human-like objects navigating a neo-noirish world comprised of sickly-colored sludge churning out of a modal backdrop of noisy darkness, often feverishly unnatural in all respects and even more striking whenever shallow focus is employed and the backgrounds become literally nothing besides indiscernible shapes. Even in its hideousness, it's utterly inveigling in its unrelenting refusal to attach itself much to reality, which might be the most salient thing it ever has to say about television.
Score: 7/10
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