★★★★☆
Lance Oppenheim’s first fiction feature casts Robert Pattinson as the host of television’s most notorious sting show, and pitches everything, enjoyably, at maximum volume.
It is 2006, and Chris Hansen (Pattinson) is the face of To Catch a Predator, the Dateline NBC strand that lured men to a sting house with decoys posing as children online, confronted them on camera and walked them out of the door to waiting police. Hansen believes he is making television history. Oppenheim, until now a documentary-maker, and his screenwriter Ajon Singh are far less sure what he is making.
Nothing here is understated. David Bolen shoots in grainy, saturated 4:3, Alex DiGerlando’s production design is relentlessly maximalist, and thunderstorms break with such reliability at moments of crisis that you start to pity anyone trying to film a television programme in this weather. It is all gloriously, deliberately too much. Oppenheim borrows the grammar of horror for the stings, and it is never quite clear who the monster in the house is meant to be; the most famous invitation to sit down in American television becomes a smoothly delivered threat.
Pattinson is darkly funny and deeply unsettling, catching Hansen’s vanity, his catchphrases and his growing appetite for the spotlight without tipping into caricature. Merritt Wever is even better as Andie Bender, the producer for whom every disaster is a ratings opportunity, and Alex Winter, barely recognisable, makes a small, pivotal role count for a great deal in the final stretch.
Primetime is an all-American nightmare, where the darkness of the human soul is slickly packaged for weekly entertainment… and sky-high ratings. Recommended.
Primetime played at the London Film Festival and was released in UK cinemas on 30 October 2026.