Primetime Review: Robert Pattinson Turns Chris Hansen Into a Horror-Movie Monster, and A24's Camera Never Blinks
Lance Oppenheim's dramatization of the 'To Catch a Predator' years is less interested in the men caught on camera than in the man holding it — and Pattinson plays that hunger for ratings like something closer to a possession.
Primetime opens with the format everyone already knows by heart: a hidden camera, a nervous man walking into a suburban kitchen, and a stranger at the table who is not who he expected. Twenty years after To Catch a Predator turned sting operations into appointment television, director Lance Oppenheim isn't interested in restaging the busts. He's interested in the man who built a career narrating them, and in what that career cost him to keep feeding. Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen as a fictionalized version of the real broadcaster — credited in the film as pursuing the same NBC Dateline segment that made him famous — and the film treats his ambition less as a character flaw than as a slow-motion transformation, shot at points like a body-horror film in a blazer.
That's the boldest choice Primetime makes, and the one that has split its subject from its critics. Reviewers have been largely won over: the film holds an 87% Tomatometer score across 194 reviews, with the Rotten Tomatoes critics' consensus calling it a movie that 'interrogates the slippery boundary between justice and lurid spectacle with crackling style and an outstanding Robert Pattinson.' Metacritic's 45-review sample lands more cautiously at a 'generally favorable' 67, with a handful of critics finding Oppenheim's arthouse instincts — long static takes, an unsettling sound design, editing that occasionally tips into the surreal — more clinical than illuminating.
Pattinson's performance is doing something specific and hard to pull off: playing a real, still-working broadcaster as a man quietly corroded by fame, without ever slipping into caricature. He's surrounded by a strong supporting cast — Merritt Wever as producer Andie Bender, Skyler Gisondo, Anna Faris as Hansen's wife Mary Joan, and Phoebe Bridgers in a small but pointed role — but the film keeps circling back to Pattinson alone in frame, increasingly unmoored from the righteousness the show sold to its audience. It's a performance built for a movie willing to sit in discomfort rather than resolve it, and it's the reason Primetime is being talked about as one of Pattinson's best big-swing roles of a year that's already given him several.
The film's real-world subject didn't take it that way. Chris Hansen reviewed Primetime publicly on his own podcast and gave Pattinson's performance a blunt D grade, calling the film 'so far over the top' that '98% of that movie... was pure fiction' and describing the version of himself on screen as 'so detached, so unhinged, so dark, so unlikable.' Hansen's objection isn't really about accuracy in the small details — it's about the film's entire thesis, that the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of ratings became impossible to separate. Whether or not you buy his conclusion, that gap between how Primetime plays for critics and how its own subject has responded to it is, on its own, the most interesting thing a based-on-real-events drama can generate this year.
Is it a great movie or a great performance wrapped around a decent one? Somewhere in between. Primetime runs a lean 109 minutes and never overstays a scene, but its refusal to give its subject an easy redemption or an easy condemnation will frustrate viewers who want the film to land on a verdict. What it does instead — building an atmosphere of moral vertigo around a man who convinced himself he was the hero of his own story — is rarer, and it's exactly the kind of swing A24 has built a brand on backing. FilmRated Score: 85/100 — a genuinely upsetting, formally confident piece of work, let down only by an ending that pulls back right when the film has earned the nerve to go further.