‘PRIMETIME’ is a fever dream about fame, monsters and staring too long into the darkness

This past weekend saw the release of PRIMETIME, Lance Oppenheim’s story of Dateline NBC’s Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and the rise and fall of both Hansen and his sensational To Catch a Predator series of the aughts.

It is an uncomfortable examination of post-9/11 America, the rise of shock-culture entertainment and, ultimately, the tragic story of a deeply flawed man who loses sight of his mission in pursuit of his own fame.

Anyone old enough to remember the glory days of 2000s television remembers NBC’s To Catch a Predator, which saw Hansen team with watchdog group Perverted Justice and local law enforcement to establish “sting houses” across the country. 

Men expecting to meet children would instead find themselves face-to-face with a cool and collected Hansen, who would pull out chat transcripts and deliver lines that became embedded in pop culture: “Why don’t you have a seat over there?” “You see how this looks, right?”

Oppenheim’s film opens with one such encounter. We see Hansen the myth — the stuff of television legend. He reads the predator’s chat transcript aloud, playing with his pronunciation and inflection, preparing for the sting. The man enters. The trap is sprung. The predator breaks down.

He is arrested and taken away, and a relieved Hansen gives his producer Andie (Merritt Wever, Severance) an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

It’s glorious. It’s funny. It’s picture-perfect for people like me who grew up watching the show weekly and continue to encounter it today through bite-sized clips on Reels and TikTok.

And then PRIMETIME takes us behind the curtain.

There is something implicit in the title To Catch a Predator: to catch a predator, perhaps you must become one of a sort. A hunter. To face darkness, you have to enter it yourself.

We are quickly introduced to Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo, The Righteous Gemstones), an aspiring actor cast as one of the show’s decoys. Dan wants nothing more than to earn his SAG card, become a real actor and, more than anything, matter.

Hansen has battles of his own. 

To Catch a Predator is looked down upon within the network but it is a ratings sensation- enough of one that NBC moves it into the titular primetime slot against ABC’s LOST. Hansen himself is looked down upon by colleagues, including celebrated war correspondent and Dateline mainstay Stone Phillips (Bill Heck).

When Hansen returns to his Vermont home in the dead of night after filming one of the movie’s early stings, he has just learned that NBC is moving Predator to primetime. He wakes his children so they can watch him on television. He tells them he’s going to be on “primetime.”

They don’t really care.

He slinks into his wife’s bedroom, where we immediately understand that he has recently been unfaithful. He begs for forgiveness before reiterating that the show is about to skyrocket.

There is something funny about all of this. Pattinson plays Hansen like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman crossed with Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire. 

This Hansen is as much mad-genius showman as journalist, a man who seemingly knows no other way to exist than to be on television.

It is funny. Until it isn’t.

When Dan arrives for his first day at a sting house, he is horrified when one of the predators exposes himself. This is far beyond anything Dan imagined when he signed up to “act,” and the experience shakes him. Andie gives him something to calm down and tells Hansen that he needs to convince Dan that what they are doing is worth it, particularly as they are already close to losing their other decoy, played wonderfully by Phoebe Bridgers.

The relationship between Hansen and Dan becomes the central tragedy of PRIMETIME. Hansen, in some way, sees Dan as a surrogate son. He plays catch with him outside their motel. He gives him life advice. He convinces Dan that what he is doing matters. Really matters.

Dan idolizes Hansen. To him, Hansen is a superhero. An actor, in his own way. An icon. Then Hansen explains why he does it.

Years earlier, while reporting for Dateline in India, Hansen covered the disappearance of children from a remote village. The tragedy drove the community mad with suspicion and violence. Eventually, the children were discovered mutilated in a jungle cave. No perpetrator was ever found.

But Hansen speaks with the young girl who discovered the bodies. She tells him she saw the killer: an ancient evil, a hideous, immortal monster.

Nobody believes her.

Except Hansen.

The experience shapes him. Defines him. Defines his mission.

And then his world begins to unravel.

A producer at rival network ABC attempts to poach Andie for a more wholesome version of the hidden-camera format. Hansen continues another affair, only for his transgressions to be captured by a photographer for the National Enquirer. Meanwhile, NBC is growing increasingly unhappy with Predator. Its move to primetime has failed to produce the desired results. LOST is burying them.

NBC gives Hansen an ultimatum: Predator needs to become must-watch event television, or it’s over.

This is where PRIMETIME takes its darkest turn, becoming a modern Moby-Dick in ways that are not exactly subtle but are no less profound for it.

Hansen’s team tells him they have a “whale” in Texas - a target potentially connected to the upper levels of local government. For Hansen, this is it.

Capturing someone that powerful could turn Predator into a ratings juggernaut. More importantly, Hansen convinces himself it might somehow right his own wrongs: his failures as a husband, his failures as a father, his failures as a man.

Meanwhile, Dan has fallen out with his aspiring-actor friends in Los Angeles. He proudly describes the lengths he goes to when creating “Decoy Dan,” only to realize that none of his nuance makes it to air. All that ambition, all that performance, all that work reduced to a man-child being used as bait.

Texas becomes Dan’s opportunity, too.

He doesn’t just want to be the bait anymore. He wants to be the hunter. He wants to be Hansen.

The team arrives in a storm-battered Texas and begins setting its trap for “the Whale.” The Enquirer is closing in on Hansen as his personal life disintegrates. Andie becomes increasingly disillusioned with the mission, which is bleeding money and resources.

During one sting, Hansen breaks down and becomes incapacitated. Dan makes his move when a physically disabled predator arrives. Dan tries to become Hansen. He throws his weight around and captures the confrontation on camera.

But something changes. Dan finally understands that he isn’t acting with these people. Dan is acting. The monsters are real. These aren’t performances.

Then the Whale reveals himself. Assistant District Attorney Bill Conradt (Alex Winter).

This is everything they have been waiting for. Dan’s big chance. Hansen’s redemption. The story that will save the show. The moment that will transform all of their lives.

Instead, PRIMETIME lunges toward an earth-shaking climax.

As the Predator team closes in, Conradt shoots himself. Dan is still on the phone with him. And then Dan realizes, in horror, that even as he breaks down, his reaction is being recorded by a hidden camera in the production van. Everything is content.

A shaken, lost Hansen stares at the house and mutters his catchphrases, seemingly incapable of comprehending that his great moment has disappeared.

All the planning. All the details. His redemption. Gone.

The Whale has been taken from him.

The moment is jaw-dropping. The air is sucked out of the theater, and for a moment you almost want to break down alongside Hansen.

PRIMETIME draws a line from 9/11 to the TikTok era: our cultural obsession with “authenticity,” with capturing every bit of light and darkness human beings can stomach - and continuing to watch even after we can’t stomach any more. After the towers fell, we needed justice. Justice in anyway possible. Hansen's show answered that desire by putting faces to a tangible and heinous threat on our doorstep. 

There is increasingly no separation between the real and the fictional. We have hurled ourselves into a world of shock entertainment and clout-chasing, endlessly pursuing monsters while risking becoming beasts of our own making.

Dan wonders whether what he does makes him a bad person — pretending to be a child, interacting with these men, becoming part of this machine.

Hansen answers calmly: “Your definition of bad and my definition of bad are vastly different.”

PRIMETIME is not interested in vindicating predators (the opposite, infact) or simply vilifying the show. Nor is it particularly interested in declaring Hansen “wrong.” Instead, it portrays him as a man genuinely driven by a righteous mission: cleanse the world of evil.

But Hansen ultimately becomes a different sort of creature.

He spends so long staring into darkness that he forgets there is light behind him. He puts everything into the mission until there is nothing else. His redemption as a human being becomes tied entirely to a crusade that, by its very nature, can never truly be completed.

“Fever dream” gets thrown around far too often when describing movies, but there may be no better description for PRIMETIME. It is uncomfortable and unflinching: a movie about darkness, ambition and what happens when we lose sight of our goals and begin convincing ourselves that achieving them will somehow absolve us of everything else.

And it works as profoundly as it does because of its cast. Gisondo, Wever and Pattinson form a staggering trio, each delivering career-best work and performances that should put them firmly in the awards conversation.

For Pattinson, that is saying something. His work here continues a run that deserves to be remembered as one of the strongest stretches of any actor of his generation.

PRIMETIME isn’t just the best movie of the year.

It is a genuine must-see picture: unsettling, funny, tragic and impossible to shake. And when awards season arrives, I suspect we’re going to be talking about it all over again