REVIEW: ‘Primetime’ Attempts To Peer Into Darkness, But Gets TV Static Instead

A24‘s Primetime is one of the largest movies playing at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. With Robert Pattinson leading the cast, the unauthorized biopic (and look back at a cultural moment) shows the past through early-aughts television grain, with great performances and a perspective that can’t decide whether to be serious or humorous. 

“We’re bringing puka shells back!” is how director Lance Oppenheim ended his Q&A at Fantastic Fest for his film Primetime. I don’t often bring up Q&A sessions in my reviews, but for Primetime, the dueling tones that Oppenheim and the film’s writer, Ajon Singh, brought to the stage encapsulated the Robert Pattinson-led film.

On the one hand, you have a director who first learned about Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator through South Park. On the other, you have a writer who opened up about how his family used television to learn English and how his mother used Chris Hansen to instill fear in him about the budding online world.

A24’s To Catch A Predator drama plots two tonal paths. 

Based on the article by Luke Dittrich, titled “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die,” Primetime is a reflection of one of the series worst moments. And while you can see that on display in bursts, the tonal disconnect between inspiration, director, and writer is clear. 

The core of the film shines a light on the last year of To Catch A Predator, its rise to the Primetime slot, and the increased focus on sensationalism and exploitation. Chris Hansen is the film’s center, with everything revolving around him up until the crushing end in Murphy, Texas. But how the film does this is where dueling perspectives and tones come into play. 

And there is no better way to explain this than through the Q&A itself. One of the filmmakers involved was celebrating cheap merch laid out on the tables in front of us after we had just watched a film about catching pedophiles and the disgusting nature of trapping them. The other was talking about Primetime as a take on American mythology, darkness, and what we see on screen.

The absurdity of hidden-camera production takes the hot seat, while Chris Hansen’s perspective gets muddier the longer the film goes on.

The clash of tones works at first. A dark film from the moment it begins; the comedy, much of which is physical or done through playing with the scenes, with some one-liners thrown in, the dark humor pokes at To Catch A Predator’s absurdity. Then, immediately after, the audience is confronted with sexual messages sent between an adult and someone they believe is a child. 

Primetime seems in on the joke in its first act. Still, when 20 minutes turns into 40, and then an hour, the few awkward laughs left for the film’s humor make the theater air thick with discomfort. At a certain point, much like the hidden camera television series itself, Primetime begins to collapse. While the performances remain just as gutting, electric, and fascinating throughout, the tonal confusion begins to shift the narrative, the guilt, and the blame. 

Are we supposed to put the blame for Murphy, Texas, at Chris Hansen’s feet? Maybe. Throughout the film, Chris Hansen becomes less a performer and more a man obsessed with relevance and reliving the high of his Emmy Award-winning investigation in India. He caught the darkness then, and he will catch it now. But what’s frustrating is how Hansen’s persona changes as he passes through the lens of judgment. 

One of the most salient lines in the film’s final act has Hansen explain that the public square where people were whipped for their crimes has become television screens, and now he is leading it. In the moment, you start to understand that in the movie theater, we’re also passing judgment on Hansen.

Primetime further immortalizes Chris Hansen; it just doesn’t seem to know why, outside of the one-liners he’s known for.

The problem is that the judgment we are passing isn’t clear. By centering the film’s finale on events in Murphy, Texas, and having Pattinson’s Hansen make eye contact in the final, shaking moment, someone is clearly to blame for To Catch a Predator. 

Is it the network that pushed Hansen to catch a big whale? Is it the decoy who spoke with the man on the phone? Is it the producer who leaned in on pushing the cops closer to the house with cameras on their guns? Is it Hansen’s obsession? Or is it the guy who tried to set up a meeting with a teenager who, in this moment, gets more sympathy than I’ve seen in any other handling of the Murphy, Texas fallout. 

With a foot in horror, both in directorial style and pacing, the film itself is more a question of ethics than anything else. Only, while it asks its audience to play a witness to Hansen’s shame and guilt, the filmmakers don’t decide where they want to end up. And ultimately, Primetime didn’t need to cast blame in its attempt to mythologize Chris Hansen.

But the guilt hangs in the film; the audience just doesn’t have a clear sense of what it’s saying. There is a cut of this movie without the humor that takes its subject matter (a series dedicated to catching child predators) seriously. There is a version of Primetime where the darkness sets in for the audience, and we see less of Chris Hansen and more of his impact.

Robert Pattinson and Skyler Gisondo deliver some of 2026’s best performances, even if the direction lets them down. 

Primetime is at its best when it isn’t letting humor undercut the severity of the subject matter, and it does so through the performances we see. In that way, Skyler Gisondo as Dan, or “Decoy Dan” as the set begins to call him, is the heart of the film. As someone who has walked into the machine that is To Catch A Predator, the emotional and traumatic impact on the actors playing the decoys is shown immediately. 

In his performance, Gisondo uses his face and fear as much as his verbal delivery. His first time is gutting; it’s painful. Somewhere along the way to the end, it gets easier, and the show becomes second nature. Only for the trauma to come right back. Dan is a victim of the show, as much as he is a cog in its machine, and his place forces the audience to interrogate what we put people through for entertainment. 

The lightheartedness we see throughout Primetime makes it difficult to see the film’s throughline or message. The tonal chaos paints a picture around stellar performances, but ultimately, Primetime feels like two films put together. One is cut from South Park, and one is cut from a place of curiosity and peering into darkness. And that muddled nature is what the performances have to overcome. At times they do, sucking the audience into an engrossing character study, and sometimes, the hill is simply too steep to climb as the consequences grow. 

Primetime can’t decide what it is, and it makes that the audience’s problem.

Primetime is likely to top nominations, whether for Pattinson or Gisondo. Robert Pattinson remains one of the most interesting actors working today because of how much he transforms into a man who is still very alive. Skyler Gisondo is raw emotional nerve, trying to ground everything in performance until he can’t anymore.

Still, the film lacks a clear vision and instead treats To Catch A Predator and the ensuing trauma too lightly to stand on solid ground. Instead of peering into the darkness that was reality television, and the push for primetime eyes, the film becomes a voyeuristic look at the past, as if the show and Hansen are simply a meme and not a television experiment that fed on worry, stoked fear, and led to more trauma, even if it did “good” along the way.

A stylish vessel of the past, Primetime asks its audience to decide what meaning to assign it, and the film is worse for it. Where “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die” asked readers to peer into darkness, Ajon Singh and Lance Oppenheim ask their audience to peer into television static instead.

Primetime screened as part of Fantastic Fest and releases in theaters nationwide on September 30, 2026.