Robert Pattinson is Wildly Unhinged in a Darkly Funny 'Primetime'

Lance Oppenheim has set himself up to have quite a year. Exploring some of our best anti-heroes (or maybe they’re just villains), he is going to be on everyone’s lips in 2026 whether it’s for his promising collaboration with Nathan Fielder documenting Elizabeth Holmes’ final days before turning herself in to prison, or his feature film about the rise of NBC’s controversial program about capturing suspected pedophiles. His narrative work is a pitch-black portrait of Americana, of a place where everything has a bottom line, even criminal investigations made for entertainment.

Robert Pattinson leads as a version of Chris Hansen, a hero not unlike one he’s played before. Sure, he is ridding the world of bad guys by investigating, capturing, and leaving the cops to jail them, but he seems to get a sick sense of power from the act. He is chasing fame and television recognition and ratings supremacy. He sees himself as a savior, liberating the masses with his work, feeling no sense of conflict about turning into entertainment. Wrapped around him are his producers, investigators, actors, his family, his mistress, and a studio who are all winners and losers in his race to the top, a race with hurdles that grow higher when their marks become increasingly vulnerable.

Pattinson takes such a bold swing with this weird naturalistic and nutty performance as Chris Hansen and absolutely knocks it out of the park. The casting of this film is incredibly inspired. Letting traditionally comedic actors like Skylar Gisondo showcase their vulnerability and heart is what makes the impossible tone of the feature work. As “Decoy Dan,”- a young actor hoping this will be his breakout role- Gisondo acts through the elation of a glitzy new role and the immediate trauma he experiences on his first outing. Merritt Wever as ruthless producer, Andie Bender, weaponizes her proclivity for soft speech and calm intonation to highlight the absolute madness that is talking a decoy down from tears and then strapping cameras to the rifles of police to best capture an arrest.

For anyone who’s watched 2025’s documentary, Predators, or read the inspiration Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die,” the happenings of the film will not be a surprise. Primetime uses stylized filmmaking and an unhinged tone to chronicle the meteoric rise of a salacious news show that ultimately “produced” an attempted arrest that ended in a death. Along the way, producers, marks, and decoys were traumatized by the things they were forced to experience leading to a modern reappraisal of what was seen as heroism, at least by the show’s host.

There’s nothing funny about predators, victims, and sex crimes but somehow there was something audiences found a bit funny about putting them on blast on television. To interrogate that, Primetime messes with tone, making a serious and dark film with no shortage of bananas hilarity.

Primetime is shot like an old Hollywood noire, complete with score and lighting. Thunder cracks atop scenes of actors contemplating their place in the world, and the terror comes from National Enquirer investigations and the plots of competing TV shows, not from the quandaries of the marks. Cinematography plays with 90s horror and thrillers, continuing in the meta/satirical nightmare the filmmakers created. The tone walks an even tighter rope than Widow’s Bay, sitting somewhere on a spectrum between Chinatown, Nightcrawler and Nathan For You.

Primetime explores the complicated people behind the cameras and asks what it is they really want, something that leaves predators and pedophiles (and some who perhaps got bad raps) as the collateral damage. It makes us wonder why we all flocked to such messy television and it’s maybe because To Catch a Predator pointed the camera at one of the worst subsets of society- during the time of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden- and let us say, “well I’m not perfect, but at least I’m not evil like that guy.”

Primetime hits theaters September 25, 2026