Just as his second film of 2026, You Can See Everything, conquers the US box office against all odds, Lance Oppenheim’s first film of the year, Primetime, arrives in the UK on a five-week delay behind its American release (You Can See Everything, fittingly, will also be five weeks late to British shores). It’s not a huge gap in the grand scheme of US-UK indie distribution but it’s still been a tough wait, and I’m extremely happy to say that our patience has been handsomely rewarded. Gripping, funny, stylistically maximalist in all the right ways, and featuring Robert Pattinson’s joint-best career performance (along with Good Time), Primetime is an absolute blast.
Pattinson takes on the role of Chris Hansen, who might not be as well-known here as he is Stateside but whose influence is still deeply felt in the UK’s own online subculture of hunting and entrapping paedophiles for ‘content’. It’s 2006, and Hansen’s show To Catch A Predator has entranced the nation, but to really earn its primetime slot, it needs to graduate from creepy loners and divorcees to men of actual power – an escalation that will lead Hansen to Texas, a District Attorney, and a suicide that would eventually kill the show.
Pattinson is just exceptional as Hansen. He hasn’t disappeared this completely into a character since Good Time’s Connie back in 2017, and the result is uncanny, his Hansen part vampire and part low-rent TV huckster, everything about him rehearsed yet with something genuinely, frighteningly real behind the eyes he’s deadened for the cameras. Hansen himself is a fascinating figure, an obvious self-promoter whose methods actually derailed getting convictions for some of the predators he trapped, but also someone whose investigative journalism probably saved children’s lives in India and Cambodia. Pattinson perfectly captures this contradiction; a man who believes himself a hero but is too fame-hungry to ever truly get there.
Around him is a perfectly assembled ensemble cast, from Merritt Wever as cynical, hyper-professional producer Andi, to Matthew Maher as Xavier, the oddball internet vigilante who is the principal investigator of Hansen’s team, to the various disgusting and pathetic men the show exposes. The best of the support, though, comes from Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plum, the 23 year old actor hired to play the decoy teen to lure the paedophiles into the sting house after Xavier seduces them in a chatroom. As always with Gisondo, he’s very funny, but he gets to add depth as Pattinson’s darkness slowly rubs off on him – a scene in which Dan suddenly tries to take control of a situation by imitating Hansen is a thrilling piece of multi-layered performance.
Obviously, it really helps that they’re all working from a great script by writer Ajon Singh, which weaves all the various predatory practices of all its characters into one great big moral tangle without ever feeling didactic and without ever forgetting to be funny – while what’s happening is mostly horrible, the people involved are also mostly absurd. Primetime is comfortable to sit in discomfort, unafraid of the queasy feeling you get when everyone is condemnable and you know that none of the lessons that could have been learned actually *have* been learned; the Hansen brand of justifiable permanent public humiliation is what the entire internet is basically about now.
That same queasiness extends to Oppenheim’s style – along with Grant Gee’s fantastic Everybody Digs Bill Evans, this is the most formally confident debut film of the year. Keeping us locked into an era-appropriate boxy TV aspect ratio, everything else is dialled up to 11. Rich, saccharine colours bleed off the screen, overexposed lights blow out the backs and sides of frames, the soundtrack is deeply eerie, and disarmingly creepy montages take us to the dark hearts of both the pre-smartphone internet and Hansen himself. It’s a gloriously maximalist, immersive, and fittingly sickly approach and Oppenheim doesn’t allow himself a single boring frame.
While its story grips regardless of how ‘spoiled’ or not you’ve been, Primetime is that rare film that works best when you go in knowing exactly where it’s heading – the article it’s based on is literally called ‘Tonight On Dateline, This Man Will Die’. It adds an inevitability that takes a funny, stylish, sublimely-paced satirical thriller and makes it all the more manic and frightening. Primetime doesn’t ask us to give our sympathies to the would-be child abusers that Hansen and co caught, but it does look us dead in the face to tell us their methods helped build the crueller world we now live in. As one of Hansen’s many catchphrases goes – “what would’ve happened if I hadn’t been here?”
