Robert Pattinson is on top of the world right now; in the past few years, he has given anywhere from standout to masterful performances in The Lighthouse, The Batman, The Boy and the Heron, Mickey 17, Die My Love, The Drama, and The Odyssey. And that’s not counting his hotly anticipated upcoming role as the antagonist of Dune Part Three this holiday, and of course The Batman II. Coming a long way from his vampire days, Pattinson has slowly developed a public persona as a passionate but lovable cinephile, a chill guy, and most importantly a pursuer of innovative art. Primetime is aptly titled, as Pattinson is also in his right at this moment.
Before you head to the theater to watch A24’s crime thriller, I highly recommend you view the 2025 documentary Predators. David Osit’s documentary exhaustively details the rise of To Catch a Predator, the massive audience it cultivated, and the imitators that followed it, attempting to get to the bottom of why America was so hungry for this kind of “justice.” It’s extremely well made and features interviews from the decoys that worked on the show as well as Chris Hansen himself. You could watch Primetime knowing nothing about NBC’s 2005 reality program, but you’ll get a lot more out of the dramatized events in the film if you are familiar with what really happened.
The film is based on the real events that led up to the creation of the To Catch a Predator series on Dateline NBC, the news network’s pop culture program that slowly turned into a true crime program. Pattinson plays journalist Chris Hansen, who teams up with the vigilante hacker group Perverted Justice to create what would become America’s most popular reality TV sensation of the mid-2000s. The film follows the show’s explosion in popularity, Hansen’s descent into an obsessive God-complex, and the emotional toll the experience took on decoy Dan Plum.
If you’re not familiar with To Catch a Predator, this is the setup. The Perverted Justice crew would fish around online pretending to be children sexually interested in adults to lure out child predators. Once they hooked one, they would continue chatting with them as a child and try to get them on a phone call. The decoys, who were 19- and 20-year-olds who looked around 13-15 years old, would talk on the phone with them until the predators agreed to meet. Hansen and his camera crew would set up in a decoy house, and the decoy would invite the predator into the home. Once they entered and perhaps said out loud that they were excited for sex, Hansen would pop out with the cameras, humiliate the predator, and drop his line “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Police waiting outside would tackle the predator as he left and arrest him, every time.
The film is interested in the show’s progression, but it’s possibly more excited about Chris Hansen himself. I think the film spent a bit too much time on Hansen’s home life, depicting the fallout from his publicly documented affair and attempts to reconcile with his wife. Pattinson plays the journalist-turned-reality TV host with perfection, disappearing into the character. With A-listers, the best compliment I can give them in a film is that I forget the actor is on the screen; minutes in, livid, erratic, and obsessed, I could only see the character Chris Hansen. Robert Pattinson had left the picture. It’s been a few years since I walked out of a film so certain that an actor must win the Oscar – from what I have seen this year, he simply has no competition.
If Hansen is the drive of Primetime, Skyler Gisondo (The Righteous Gemstones, Superman) is the heart of the film. Gisondo plays Dan Plum, a 21-year-old decoy based on the real decoy from the show, Dan Schrack. Plum is an aspiring actor who has only done commercials until he’s thrown onto a set with a predator without understanding what show he’s on. Throughout the film, he finds that he’s quite good at pretending to be 15, but is very bothered by what exactly it is they’re doing. He has as hard a time processing the show as we, the viewers, do – it is, inarguably, not justice. But the people of the United States are instantly hooked, and treat him as a superhero. The people do not want justice – they want pre-emptive revenge. Gisondo does an incredible job as well, and I wouldn’t be upset if he appeared in the supporting actor category this year.
If you are familiar with To Catch a Predator, and you know what happened to District Attorney Bill Conradt in real life, then you already know it will be the climax of the film. I knew, and I was still not prepared for the level of emotion director Lance Oppenheim managed to achieve. Primetime is haunting, harrowing, and saddening to watch; but at the same time, the worst part of each of us is pleased to see these monsters humiliated on national TV and then dragged away. But they’re not monsters, are they? As Conradt reminds us in the film, they are humans. Either we agree that humans deserve justice, or we don’t.
I think what Primetime does best is putting this question front and center. As a public, is it justice we want? It does not seem that the American people are satisfied with justice – many people in the film tell Hansen as much, and many millions more in real life said so while the program aired. They want, at their core, to see violence enacted on targets who they have deemed societally acceptable recipients of it. All they want is the violence, and an outlet for it has been presented. None of the men To Catch a Predator caught had ever enacted sexual violence before their sting operation. They had not committed a crime until the Perverted Justice team baited them into it. So, when Hansen asks, “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?”, we, as a country, are simply left to wonder: did we ever want justice in the first place?
Score: 9/10 – Excellent
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