The Predator Catcher Turns Predatory in “Primetime”

“Primetime,” as it happens, is Oppenheim’s first stab at fiction. He previously directed the documentary features “Some Kind of Heaven” (2021), a panoramic portrait of a retirement community, and “Spermworld” (2024), which explored the growing online market for sperm donations—the end and the beginning of life in two wittily framed, dryly observant films. Both were shot by David Bolen, whom Oppenheim has retained for “Primetime.” Their work here evokes the grubby, pixellated textures and the seedy-dreamy ambience of a bygone trash-TV era. The atmosphere persists even when the characters are off the air, as if to suggest that the seeping rot of the show has metastasized into every moment of their lives. The frame is squarish in shape, recalling the years before wide-screens were widespread; the colors, especially the flesh tones, are luridly oversaturated. At times, Oppenheim zooms in on his characters so intently that he seems ready to claw their faces off, the better to penetrate through to their darkest depths.

But what would he find? Pattinson’s dazzlingly contoured performance doesn’t provide any easy answers. His Chris Hansen is all flashy surface, full of jittery go-getter energy and disturbingly devoid of inner life. At NBC, he’s a second-tier golden boy, stuck in the shadow of the “Dateline” anchor Stone Phillips (Bill Heck), who’s off doing serious reporting in places like Afghanistan. (The war on terror, the film suggests, was one of the few things that could command American attention spans in the early two-thousands, along with Britney Spears and reality TV.) Meanwhile, Hansen’s work has taken a toll on his family life in Stamford, Connecticut, where he occasionally drops in on his wife (Anna Faris) and their two young sons. Then it’s back on the road to sniff out sex offenders in towns like Fort Myers, Florida, where one of Hansen’s extramarital affairs has attracted the notice of the National Enquirer. The irony of America’s most famous entrapment artist facing his own public humiliation is not lost on him.

Challenged on all sides, Hansen finds that his only recourse is to throw himself, with ever more frenzied self-seriousness, into his work. Sitting down with Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), a naïve yet ambitious twenty-three-year-old who’s been cast as a decoy, Hansen denies that what they’re doing has any relation to acting; they’re in the truthtelling business. His own behavior belies that notion. Preparing to make his “gotcha!” entrance, Hansen rehearses the incriminating chat messages that he plans to read: “I will undress you, and you will undress me,” he murmurs, and Pattinson, magnificently repellent, draws out the juicy salaciousness in every word. If you saw the actor’s dual performances in “Mickey 17” (2025), you know that his single most chameleonic attribute is his voice, which he can inflect and distort with virtuosic skill. No less slippery are his matinée-idol looks, which can turn wolfish or ratty on a dime, as if his beauty were moldering away from within. Again and again, Pattinson evinces a pig-in-shit delight in his characters’ rough edges, frayed nerves, and devious motives—not that Hansen would ever admit to the last, convinced as he is of the nobility of his cause. “We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” he declares.

His colleagues are not so high-minded, and as pressures and budgets mount—more episodes, fresh locations, higher-profile targets—the film becomes a vision of something strikingly relatable: the low-morale workplace. When Bender considers moving to a rival network, Wever fleshes out the tough carapace of a woman who, even under the thorniest of circumstances, never stops calculating her next move. “Decoy Dan,” as Hansen christens him, just wants to be an actor, and Gisondo shows the layers of the young man’s confusion, vulnerability, and desperation as he realizes how limited his opportunities are. The team’s creepiest and most contented member is Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), an online vigilante who arranges the show’s meetups, spending his days and nights fishing around in online chat rooms.

And what of the fish? Like “Predators,” “Primetime” allows us to feel a twinge of pity on their behalf. One target has a disability; another turns out to be a rabbi, who responds to his confrontation with suitably Talmudic indignation. Singh’s script climaxes with the fatal 2006 incident that ultimately took “To Catch a Predator” off the air—a would-be predator’s suicide, triggered by the zealous overreach of the show’s camera crew and the police. But the film’s depiction of the tragedy feels cynical and rote, and one shot in particular, all meticulously art-directed blood spatter, throws the aesthetic virtues and dramatic limitations of “Primetime” into sharp relief. Oppenheim has persuasively rendered a grotesque phenomenon, but his curiosity seems to stop at how everyone and everything looked. There’s no deeper analytical heft to the movie, no larger curiosity about what “To Catch a Predator” meant then or what it might mean now, especially in the wake of the sex-trafficking conspiracy theories of QAnon and the very real, still emerging horrors of the Epstein files.