Primetime Movie Review (2026)
A tense drama about the television host behind To Catch a Predator, Primetime turns the true-crime subject into a disturbing, highly stylized nightmare, with excellent performances and expressionistic visuals.
Like many people, I first met Robert Pattinson as Edward in Twilight. I’ll admit that after the second movie (my least favorite), I read all the books and became a bit of a Twilight junkie. I even took half a day off of work to go see the last film the day it was released. But Robert Pattinson has come a long way from being a silver-skinned vampire. He’s proven he has real acting chops and a good sense for choosing interesting projects, and he’s done it again here.
Primetime takes place in 2006, when Chris Hansen and an NBC team ran the show To Catch A Predator. Setting up stings where an adult would text with men looking to meet up with young teenagers, a decoy would pose as the kid, invite the perpetrator inside the house, and Hansen would confront the man. The rest of the team would file in, and ultimately, the person would be arrested on camera. Hansen wants his show to be the best and, leaving his two sons and wife at home, thinks only of himself and his own success, even as they cast a new decoy who is thrown right into the unsettling action.
This is a dark, provocative film that is not for the faint of heart, so please keep that in mind when choosing a movie. The subject of the show itself is tough, and watching the mechanics behind the scenes creates a moral dilemma for the viewer as spectacle and the desire for a better show become the main focus. That’s part of what the movie does so well.
From the first seconds of the film, a low, thudding heartbeat plays. You hear it and feel it in your body, creating unease and a growing sense of claustrophobia until the last frames.
The cast is fantastic, but Robert Pattinson stands out. As the face of To Catch A Predator, Pattinson’s Hansen is exaggerated and theatrical, practicing his lines so that the most chilling texts are vocalized on the show. His motivations are deeply unsettling, and Pattinson becomes almost hypnotic as the movie moves toward its climax, obsessively looking for a way to make his show the winner in the ratings against LOST. It’s an excellent performance in a fever dream of a film. Additionally, the second you see Merritt Wever come into frame, she is the grounding you’ve been looking for. Her character is just as grimy as Hansen, but in a wholly different way. I loved her.
Visually, I kept thinking of Chris Hansen as a clown. He always has a splash of red across his face, and as the film goes on, the distortion grows. By the end, my exact thought was that he had gone from a regular clown to a sad clown. You’ll see what I mean. It’s near grotesque.
Primetime isn’t a movie that you “like,” but it is an incredibly effective film. It has an air of horror in its visually striking, grainy filming choices, along with the feeling that the walls are closing in and the lurid show choices, but it isn’t scary in a traditional sense. If I didn’t know that this was an A24 movie, I could have guessed it, as Primetime fits comfortably into the section of their catalog of odd but fascinating films.
I am laying a trigger warning at your feet, but as long as you know what you’re getting into, this is incredibly unique and completely worth watching.
Runtime: 110 minutes
Motion Picture Rating: R
Languages Spoken In The Film: English
Should You Watch It? Yes
Did I Cry? Nope
My Rating: 3.75/5 Stars
Available: Currently in theaters
