Primetime (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Primetime

⭐⭐⭐⭐

A stylish, deeply unsettling examination of the line between justice and entertainment

I knew absolutely nothing about the real-life events behind Primetime, nor about To Catch a Predator, the actual TV programme at the centre of it.

The film makes quite a big deal about the fact that To Catch a Predator was competing with the TV series Lost back in the mid-2000s, so it’s fair to assume I was probably too busy watching J. J. Abrams’ show to notice any of this happening!

Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, the American television presenter who hosted To Catch a Predator. The premise was as simple as it was unsettling: men who believed they were arranging to meet underage children were lured into a house filled with hidden cameras and microphones, where they would be confronted by Hansen and, in many cases, subsequently arrested by the police. The whole thing was then edited, packaged and broadcast as television entertainment.

Now, on the surface, this is obviously a film about catching paedophiles. But as it plays out, it becomes about something else, just as disturbing: what happens when the pursuit of justice becomes entertainment, and entertainment slowly becomes more important than justice itself?

And that’s where Primetime becomes fascinating.

The men being exposed are obviously pretty disgusting individuals, and watching their behaviour is often stomach-churning. But as the TV programme becomes more successful, the moral lines in the film begin to blur. The producers start to manipulate situations, as they so often do, even in documentaries (and I can tell you from experience that very little of what you see on TV is quite as spontaneous as it appears). The cameras turn humiliation into a spectacle, and the audience is invited to enjoy watching these people being publicly exposed.

And at this point, another rather uncomfortable question starts to form in my head.

What about us?

Whether we’re sitting in a cinema or watching at home, we’re glued to the screen, gripped by the tension, enjoying the suspense and occasionally even the grotesque absurdity of the situation.

Are we being manipulated in exactly the same way as the audience watching the original TV show? Is the film deliberately making us complicit in the very thing it’s criticising?

Or does it fall into the same trap itself?

I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. But the fact that it made me ask those questions is interesting in itself.

Director Lance Oppenheim comes from documentary filmmaking (in fact, he also has a great new documentary, likely to win the Oscar, coming out in two weeks, You Can See Everything). You can see his fascination with the whole machinery of television: the cameras, the microphones, the monitors, the staging of supposedly spontaneous encounters and the strange process of turning real events into entertainment.

Visually, though, this is anything but a documentary. The film is drenched in saturated colours, with degraded video textures and all sorts of stylistic flourishes that evoke the television world of the mid-2000s. Some of it is effective, although I must admit I found a few of the visual tricks a little excessive and not entirely necessary.

But the atmosphere is extraordinary. It’s dark, deeply unsettling and at times almost horrifying. This feels more like a psychological horror film than a conventional drama about television.

And then there’s Robert Pattinson.

He’s absolutely brilliant, and rather disturbing too. He’s effectively playing a man who’s playing a part. A performance within a performance.

Hansen presents himself as a calm, authoritative journalist, a man on the side of truth and justice. But underneath that immaculate TV persona, Pattinson’s Hansen gradually reveals himself as a cold, calculating individual. He’s superb at making the cracks in that carefully constructed image increasingly visible.

Given the subject matter, the film is, needless to say, rather disturbing and pretty uncomfortable. There were moments when it genuinely gave me the shivers. But without giving too much away, by the end, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was supposed to take away from it. I can’t help feeling that something was missing.

There’s a difference between deliberately leaving an audience unsettled and leaving them feeling that something hasn’t quite been fully explored. And I suspect this film does a little of both.

Perhaps the absence of a satisfying moral resolution or reckoning is precisely the point. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that the film doesn’t entirely know what to do with many of the fascinating and uncomfortable questions it’s raising.

Still, this is a remarkably confident, stylish and powerful film, with an extraordinary central performance (in fact, more than one, as Skyler Gisondo is equally great), and it will certainly stay with me for quite some time.

And yet, considering what the film is actually about, I can’t help feeling a little guilty about just how gripped I was by it.