Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime turns Chris Hansen’s rise into a gripping warning about what happens when justice becomes performance, and ratings become the measure of right and wrong.
Lance Oppenheim makes his narrative feature debut with Primetime (2026), a darkly funny and increasingly nightmarish drama inspired by the rise of To Catch a Predator. A24 officially describes the film as “inspired by true events” and places the story in 2006, when Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) sets out to make television history.
But Primetime is not a Chris Hansen biopic. It is a deliberately heightened retelling that mixes recognizable history with invented characters, compressed events, and surreal flourishes. Oppenheim has said that he was interested in the theatricality and mixture of truth and fiction surrounding Hansen, while later describing his goal as mythologizing the television host rather than simply recreating him.
That distinction matters because Primetime is ultimately less interested in telling audiences exactly what happened than in asking what happens when justice becomes a television performance. The answer gets uglier as the ratings climb.
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
Primetime Plot and Storyline
Hansen and producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) oversee sting operations in which adult decoys pose as teenagers online. Potential offenders are encouraged to visit a random house, where Hansen suddenly appears, confronts them about their messages, and reveals that the house is bugged with television cameras.
The operation becomes more complicated when aspiring actor Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) joins as a decoy. Unlike experienced decoy Del (Phoebe Bridgers), Dan initially approaches the job like another strange acting gig that might finally earn him his Screen Actors Guild (SAG) membership card.
That innocence does not last long.
Dan has to absorb sexually explicit conversations, imitate a teenager, and stay convincing while facing men who believe they are meeting minors. He may technically be an actor, but the emotional consequences are not pretend.
Meanwhile, Hansen learns that To Catch a Predator has a chance to move into primetime. Success brings a new problem: the show now has to keep delivering something big enough to hold an audience.
Soon, exposing offenders is no longer enough. Hansen wants television history.
Robert Pattinson Is Almost Rage-Baiting Chris Hansen
Pattinson does not disappear into Hansen so much as turn him into an event.
The voice is recognizable, but the performance goes far beyond imitation. His Hansen walks into every room with the confidence of someone who has started believing that catching bad people automatically makes him the good guy.
At times, it honestly feels like Pattinson is rage-baiting the real Chris Hansen. Every stiff smile, dramatic pause, burst of insecurity, and self-important declaration pushes the character just far enough that the real Hansen might want to throw something at the screen.
That approach works because Primetime is not asking Pattinson to produce an accurate museum exhibit. Hansen becomes a television character who has spent so many years performing Chris Hansen that the performance has swallowed the person underneath.
Oppenheim told NPR that the real Hansen had criticized the film before seeing it, while the director stressed that his intention was not simply to make Hansen a villain. Instead, he wanted to turn him into the almost superhero-like figure he remembered from childhood.
The result is hilarious until it becomes frightening.
When Reality Becomes Performance
The smartest thing about Primetime is how difficult it becomes to tell where reality ends and television begins.
The houses are real spaces turned into sets. The conversations involve real adults talking to actors pretending to be children. Police wait nearby while producers monitor cameras and Hansen rehearses lines taken from disturbing chat logs.
Everybody is performing, but the consequences remain real.
Oppenheim and cinematographer David Bolen constantly move between polished cinema, surveillance footage, television images, and early digital textures. The result feels like several versions of reality competing on the same screen.
That is exactly what To Catch a Predator represents in the film. It does not merely record an event. It builds the environment, creates the encounter, chooses the camera angles, edits the footage, and then presents the finished product as something viewers simply witnessed.
Primetime understands that reality television can be real and manufactured at the same time.
Dan Plum Shows Who Else Gets Exploited
Gisondo quietly gives the film its most human performance.
Dan enters the production wanting a job. His youthful appearance becomes useful to people who need someone believable enough to play a child, but the show treats his discomfort like another production problem to manage.
That makes Dan essential to the film’s larger argument. The suspected predators may be the obvious targets, but they are not the only people being used.
Dan is valuable because he can be placed between danger and a camera.
His relationship with Hansen makes this worse. Hansen becomes something between mentor and father figure, giving Dan approval at exactly the moments when the younger man needs reassurance that the work is still worth doing.
The manipulation does not require Hansen to twirl a metaphorical mustache. He can care about Dan while still using him.
That is what makes Primetime so nuanced. Good intentions and exploitation can exist in the same room.
Public Morality Meets Private Hypocrisy
The subplot involving Hansen’s marriage to Mary Joan Hansen (Anna Faris) and his affair initially seems disconnected from the sting operations.
It eventually becomes valuable because of what it reveals about his relationship with judgment.
Hansen is comfortable confronting strangers with evidence of their wrongdoing. When the scrutiny shifts toward his own behavior, that confidence suddenly becomes much less impressive.
Of course, marital infidelity is nowhere near comparable to attempting to sexually exploit a child. Primetime does not need the two actions to be morally equal for the contradiction to matter.
The point is hypocrisy.
Hansen builds a public identity around accountability while struggling to practice accountability privately. The same man who calmly asks others to explain themselves becomes far less poised when he has explaining to do.
The Whale Changes Everything
The film’s most revealing word may be “whale.”
Once Hansen and the production begin searching for one enormous catch, a high-profile offender capable of delivering unforgettable television, the mission has clearly changed.
They are no longer merely finding cases. They are hunting for the best episode.
Calling a human being a whale also turns the operation into sport. Bigger prey means bigger television, and bigger television means better ratings.
That logic leads to an uncomfortable hypothetical the film never has to say aloud. If To Catch a Predator had continued for years while audiences demanded bigger catches, it is not difficult to imagine the machine eventually manufacturing cases once reality stopped providing stories dramatic enough to satisfy the ratings.
That is where the difference between documenting reality and producing reality becomes genuinely dangerous.
Primetime Sometimes Explains Hansen Too Much
The movie is less convincing when it tries to give Hansen’s obsession a deeper psychological origin. Hansen tells Dan that their work serves the greater purpose of “cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” connecting the stings to an earlier reporting assignment in India involving missing children.
He recalls being told about an ancient evil that had supposedly retreated into a cave after desperate villagers began killing one another. The story gives Primetime some of its minor jump scares and helps explain why Hansen increasingly sees himself as someone fighting something much larger than individual crimes.
But the film may be giving Hansen more of a belief system than he actually needs as a character. Asking audiences to trace his crusade back to a child-snatching-monster mythology from his time in India makes his behavior feel almost too neatly explained.
Hansen is more unsettling when ambition, insecurity, righteousness, and attention are enough to drive him. Elsewhere, Pattinson plays him almost like a hollow center wrapped in an enormous ego, someone whose strongest faith is ultimately in his own importance.
That version of Hansen is scarier because it requires no ancient evil hiding in a cave. Sometimes ratings, applause, and the conviction that only one person can deliver justice are more than enough.
Primetime‘s Ending Makes The Performance Real
Trigger warning: Mention of suicide.
Everything finally collapses around the Texas operation.
The production identifies Bill Conradt (Alex Winter) as its coveted whale. When he does not arrive at the sting house, the show and police take the confrontation to him instead.
Vanity Fair notes that the film draws this climax from the real death of Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt while reshaping real people and events through Oppenheim’s surreal fictional treatment.
Dan is pulled directly into the operation. While talking to a distraught Conradt on the phone as the police enter the lawyer’s mansion, Dan sings “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent a cappella in what becomes one of the most uncomfortable scenes in the movie.
Good luck hearing it the same way again.
The operation ends with Conradt shooting himself in the head before the police can get him and before Hansen can deliver the confrontation he has spent almost the entire film perfecting.
And that absence becomes the point.
Hansen is left outside with no interview, no triumphant reveal, and no clean ending for television. The machinery has finally produced a consequence too real to fit neatly into the format.
Dan eventually receives the SAG membership card he wanted.
It should feel like success. Instead, it feels like a receipt.
Final Thoughts
Primetime works because it refuses to flatten this story into heroes and villains.
The men targeted by the show do not become innocent because the production behaves unethically. The decoys can believe in protecting children while still being exploited. Producers can serve a public interest while also wanting ratings.
Even Hansen can believe that he is helping people while becoming addicted to being seen helping them.
That contradiction gives Primetime its bite. Justice becomes dangerous when the performance of justice becomes more important than the people supposedly being protected.
And that warning reaches far beyond 2006.
Public humiliation no longer needs a television network, a suburban sting house, or a primetime slot. Anyone with a phone can turn another person’s worst moment into content, and algorithms can reward escalation faster than Nielsen ratings ever could.
Primetime therefore looks backward only to point forward. The technology changes, but the temptation remains exactly the same.
Once an audience keeps demanding a bigger spectacle, somebody eventually has to decide how far they are willing to go to provide one.
Primetime is showing exclusively in SM Cinemas. Share your thoughts on the film in the comments below.
Media: A24, Primetime official Facebook page, A24 official YouTube page
Source: Primetime (2026), A24, NPR, Vanity Fair
