Primetime Review
Primetime wants you uncomfortable, and it gets there fast. I have no problem with a film asking me to sit with something ugly. My problem is walking out of that discomfort feeling like the movie backed away from its own best questions. Making an audience squirm is easy. Giving that squirm somewhere meaningful to go is the hard part, and this one only gets halfway.
What Primetime Is About
Lance Oppenheim’s Chris Hansen movie drops us into 2006, with the To Catch a Predator host chasing a slice of television history. That setup could have been a simple bad-guys-get-caught story. Instead, it opens a much thornier door. Who profits when an investigation becomes entertainment, and who is left holding the consequences once the cameras are packed up?
Pattinson plays Hansen, with Merritt Wever as Andie Bender, the show’s producer. Then we have Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb. Dan is an aspiring actor who signs on as a decoy, hoping to earn his SAG card, and walks into a world he doesn’t fully understand. He is the most interesting doorway into this story for me, because he puts a human face on the ethical questions the film keeps raising.
Check out the trailer below.
Primetime Review: What I Did and Didn’t Like
Outside of the performances, the look is what won me over. The film has a retro texture that read more late ’90s to me than mid-2000s. I took that as a mood rather than a period claim, and I loved it. That visual personality kept me leaning in even when the story started to drift.
The style is no accident. Oppenheim said in interviews previously that he shot a mountain of footage and leaned on editor Daniel Garber to apply lessons from the documentaries they made together, aiming to live inside the visual language of reality TV. For a movie about Chris Hansen, that’s exactly the right instinct. The whole subject is television as a constructed experience, so it makes sense for the film to look like one.
Where it lost me was in what it chose to look at. I wanted far more time with the decoys and what this job does to a person’s head. Dan gives us flashes of that, and each time he does, I could feel a more devastating film sitting just off to the side, one Primetime never quite steps into.
That gap matters because this toll was real. In Predators, David Osit’s 2025 documentary about the show, former decoy Casey Mauro described still feeling emotionally drained years later. Dan Schrack, who also took part, talked about struggling to revisit a recording tied to his time on the show. Real people carried that weight home, which makes the film’s light touch on it feel like a missed opportunity.
I didn’t need a different movie, just for this one to stay with those people a little longer. What does it cost to make yourself look vulnerable, on purpose and for a paycheck, to someone who means you harm? And how easily do you shake off that performance once the cameras stop rolling?
The Script
Ajon Singh wrote the screenplay, and my reservations have less to do with the subject than with how the story handles it. Depicting a messy situation and telling a story messily are two different things. Primetime blurs them too often. I understood the ugliness it wanted me to see. I wanted a sharper sense of what it found underneath.
The central ethical tension is a great one. Protecting children matters, and questioning the machinery of a TV production doesn’t diminish that at all. Those competing priorities deserve careful handling precisely because both are real. I wanted the film to dig harder into how people justify harmful choices while staying convinced they’re the good guys.
Instead, I did most of that digging in the car afterward, talking to a fellow film critic. Ambiguity can be powerful with material this uncomfortable, but it only works when the film hands you enough to wrestle with. Several ideas here felt underbaked rather than deliberately left open.
Without spoiling anything, the ending fell flat for me. I wasn’t looking for a tidy bow or a reassuring speech, which would have been wrong for this material anyway. I wanted a payoff, emotional or thematic, that made the previous two hours of discomfort feel earned.
That ending fits the film’s overall messiness, and some viewers will find that bold. For me, it cemented the frustration instead of transforming it. Maybe that’s why Dan stuck with me. Following him further wouldn’t require the movie to solve every moral question. It would simply let us feel the fallout instead of leaving that emotional work outside the frame.
The Performances
Pattinson is a major reason to buy a ticket, reservations and all. He held my attention in ways the screenplay couldn’t always manage, and the strength of his work made the missed opportunities sting more. I can admire a performance without pretending it fixes the movie around it. Funny enough, he wasn’t supposed to be in front of the camera at all. Pattinson started on the project as a producer and grew more attached to the lead as development went on. Knowing that makes the commitment on screen even more interesting to watch.
Wever deserves every bit as much attention. She is one of the film’s biggest assets, and I would have happily traded some runtime elsewhere for more of her. Between the two of them, I stayed engaged even as the story lost focus. The acting is not the problem here.
Then there’s Gisondo, whose Dan carries so much of what I wanted the film to explore. Oppenheim cast him because of the earnestness in his earlier work, even though Gisondo first tried to talk him out of it. I’m glad the director won that argument. Dan’s openness gives the film its best counterweight to the production machine grinding around him.
Overall Thoughts
Our local Atlanta critics circle was pretty split on Primetime. Several people loved it, and one of them jokingly dubbed it “How to Catch an Oscar.” I get the enthusiasm for the acting, and Pattinson’s awards season odds are a real conversation. I just don’t think that joke captures the film as a whole.
For me, this is a messy movie with fantastic performances and a visual style I appreciated. The discomfort is intentional, but the impact comes up short. The decoys’ psychological experience could have given its message real weight, and the script barely scratches it.
Primetime hits theaters September 25, and I suspect the film people talk about afterward will be the one they wish they’d seen, starring the kid who just wanted his SAG card.
Primetime Review: The Grade
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Primetime (2026)
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