“Primetime” is Oppenheim’s first foray into fiction. He previously directed two humorously framed, dryly observational films, “Some Kind of Heaven” (2021), a panoramic portrait of a retirement community, and “Spermworld” (2024), a documentary examining the growing market for online sperm donations (the end and beginning of life). Both were shot by David Bolen, whom Oppenheim hired for “Primetime.” His work here evokes the dirty, pixelated textures and seedy-dreamy ambience of the bygone trash TV era. The atmosphere continues even when the characters are not on the air, as if implying that the rottenness of the show has permeated every moment of their lives. The bezel is square, reminiscent of the years before widescreen displays became commonplace; colors, especially skin tones, are overly saturated. At times, Oppenheim zooms in so intently on his characters that he seems ready to claw at their faces to better penetrate their darkest depths.
But what would he find? Pattinson’s dazzlingly sculpted performance offers no easy answers. His Chris Hansen is all flashy surface, full of tense, agitated energy and disturbingly devoid of inner life. At NBC, he’s the second-tier golden boy, overshadowed by “Dateline” host Stone Phillips (Bill Heck), who does serious reporting in places like Afghanistan. (The war on terror, the film suggests, was one of the few things, along with Britney Spears and reality TV, that could capture America’s attention in the early two-thousands.) Meanwhile, Hansen’s job took its toll on his family life in Stamford, Connecticut, where he occasionally stopped by his wife (Anna Faris) and two young sons. Then it’s back on the road to identify sex offenders in towns like Fort Myers, Florida, where one of Hansen’s extramarital affairs draws attention. National Researcher. The irony of America’s most famous trap artist facing public humiliation is not lost on him.
Challenged from all sides, Hansen realizes that his only recourse is to devote himself to his work with even more insane seriousness. Sitting down with the naive but ambitious twenty-three-year-old Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), portrayed as bait, Hansen denies that their work has anything to do with acting; they are in the business of telling the truth. His own behavior belies this notion. “Gotcha!” Hansen rehearses the incriminating chat messages he plans to read in the introduction: “I’ll undress you, you’ll undress me,” he mutters, and the utterly repulsive Pattinson brings out the juicy obscenity in every word. If you’ve seen the actor’s dual performance in “Mickey 17” (2025), you know that his most chameleonic quality is his voice, which he can influence and distort with masterful skill. No less slippery is her matinee-idol look, which can turn wormy or dilapidated on a dime, as if her beauty is rotting from the inside. Pattinson repeatedly reveals that he gets a shit-ton of pleasure from his characters’ rough edges, frayed nerves, and devious motives; but Hansen, convinced of the nobility of his cause, will never accept the last. “We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” he declares.
His colleagues aren’t as high-minded, and as the pressures and budgets mount (more episodes, new locations, higher-profile targets) the film becomes a vision of something strikingly relatable: a workplace with low morale. When Bender considers moving to a rival network, Wever details the hard shell of a woman who never stops calculating her next move, even under the most trying circumstances. “Trap Dan,” as Hansen calls him, just wants to be an actor, and Gisondo shows the layers of confusion, vulnerability, and despair of the young man as he realizes how limited his opportunities are. The creepiest and most contented member of the team is online vigilante Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), who organizes the show’s meet-ups and spends his days and nights fishing in online chat rooms.
What about fish? Like “Predators,” “Primetime” allows us to feel some pity for them. One of the targets has a disability; another turned out to be a rabbi who responded to his confrontation with Talmudic anger. Singh’s script culminates in the fatal incident that forced “To Catch a Predator” off the air in 2006; This incident is the suicide of a predator, triggered by the excessive intervention of the series’ camera crew and the police. But the film’s portrayal of tragedy feels cynical and rote, and one shot in particular involving blood splatter, all meticulously orchestrated by artistry, brings into sharp relief “Primetime’s” aesthetic virtues and dramatic limitations. Oppenheim has convincingly demonstrated a strange phenomenon, but his curiosity about how everyone and everything looks seems to have come to an end. There’s no deeper analytical heft to the film, no greater wonder about what “To Catch a Predator” meant then or might mean now, especially in the wake of QAnon’s sex-trafficking conspiracy theories and the very real, still-emerging horrors of the Epstein files.