Primetime review: Robert Pattinson is splendidly icy in Lance Oppenheim’s sly ‘other film’

Primetime

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Director: Lance Oppenheim

Cert: 16

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Matthew Maher, Bokeem Woodbine, Anna Faris, Jonathan Lipnicki

Running Time: 1 hr 49 mins

On September 5th, when this impressively oily film premiered at Venice International Film Festival, the movie world fully expected Lance Oppenheim, its singular director, to be a player in the coming awards season.

Primetime, shot in sickly heterogenous blotches, goes among the makers of the most controversial US TV show of the noughties. A splendidly icy Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, host of To Catch a Predator, primetime paedophile hunt, in a film that pulses with implicit dilemmas.

Does it matter that the show is staged like the broadest gotcha? Should we worry that it involves undisguised entrapment? Isn’t this how the Romans entertained themselves at the Colosseum?

The day after that Venice premiere, Oppenheim presented a secret screening of You Can See Everything – a film few knew even existed – at the Telluride film festival. Primetime immediately became his “other” 2026 film.

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You Can See Everything, the hybrid documentary that he directed with Nathan Fielder about the Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, is now drawing all the heat. It would be a shame if it nudged Primetime into the shadows. Here is a film as indecently diverting as the show it examines.

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Ajon Singh’s screenplay explains the dynamics of To Catch a Predator with slick lucidity.

Xavier Von Erck, played by the great character actor Matthew Maher, lays the digital breadcrumbs throughout the internet. He gets into conversations with those seeking underage partners and lures them to a meeting at a property that – unknown to the targets, obviously – is stuffed with hidden cameras.

Skyler Gisondo is terrific as Dan Plum, an aspiring actor who, altering his voice from adult pitch, convincingly ages down as the supposed victim.

When the target has sufficiently incriminated himself, Hansen emerges to spring the unbeatable trap. Law-enforcement officers are waiting to take the suspect into custody.

They do things differently in the United States (or they did between 2004 and 2007, when To Catch a Predator screened on NBC). Pattinson’s take on the key reveal is absurdly theatrical. “Big night planned?” he sniffs at the puzzled mark before descending the staircase as might Bette Davis in All About Eve.

We are never in any doubt that the show is a work of melodrama aimed at – when such things still mattered – hollowing out its own den in network primetime.

Merritt Wever is relentless as a producer fuelled by revelations and ratings. Pattinson’s performance is too hooded to stand as a portrait of Hansen. The on-screen persona is ludicrous, but it reveals little more motivation than does the enigmatic persona we meet in “real life”.

Everyone here seems part of a capitalist mechanism that might never start up again if it paused for a routine service on its ethics valves.

The film’s queasy cinematography is at the core of its ambiguous appeal. The lighting cameraman David Bolen employed 12 formats to keep us on edge, including vintage broadcast cameras, mini-DV, standard movie cameras and, most daringly, a micro-endoscope more often used for colonoscopies. The resulting visual nausea is quite in keeping with the material.

There is a sense here of a dying era. Streaming and social media are about to strip broadcast TV of the cultural importance it had held for 60 years. Hansen’s successors now do their worst online with no fear of nervy producers and with less attention from overworked industry regulators.

If the moral issues were finessed in To Catch a Predator’s peak period, they are barely even addressed these days. Primetime is, however, no eulogy for a lost era. There are surprising echoes of Sidney Lumet’s Network here. That 1976 film worried about where the contemporaneous industry was heading. Oppenheim’s sly picture is fretful at how far it had already fallen two decades ago. Enter at your own risk.

In cinemas from Wednesday, October 28th