Robert Pattinson plays disgraced To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in Primetime, documentarian Lance Oppenheim's first fiction feature, which premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and opens in theaters on September 25.

The film's opening shot sets the thesis. Hansen appears cast in devilish red light, swallowed by shadow, shot in eerie mini-DV grain, reciting "I will undress you and you will undress me" over and over in Hansen's trademark brassy, rehearsed tone. A haunted fairytale score glitches against ominous children's-show chimes. From the first frame, Oppenheim and first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh frame the host as the menace.

The past year has confirmed Pattinson's sixth sense for villainy, following his vile suitor in The Odyssey, his cold future husband in The Drama, and his genetically engineered shapeshifting evil in the upcoming Dune: Part Three. His Hansen is selfish and self-aggrandizing at every turn. Even his apology to his wife — falling to his knees, admitting everything she has accused him of — carries a self-adulating performance, as if staged for the hidden cameras that form the visual DNA of his Dateline NBC show.

Singh adapted the screenplay from Luke Dittrich's 2007 Esquire article "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die," which remains best unread before viewing if the final act's mystery matters to you. The plot tracks Hansen, lead producer Andie, and a small crew as they launch the maligned show, find an audience, get moved to primetime to compete with Lost — "We're gonna be bigger than Lost!" Hansen screams, fists clenched, drunk on power — and grind toward a luminous future that hits a brick wall.

David Bolen's cinematography merges buzzy mini-DV and TV-screen visuals with a soft-edged, vividly colored glow, thanks to colorist Damien Vandercruyssen. Bolen and Oppenheim have shaped that look across every project since 2020's Some Kind of Heaven, with 2024's Spermworld carrying the closest precedent. The aesthetic fits a film about compulsive viewing: it turns viewers into moths flying into the lamp of the screen, and it transforms mundane sets — a motel sequence, guided by production designer Alex DiGerlando — into sights to behold.

The real history carries its own weight. To Catch a Predator began as a single Dateline segment in November 2004, returned for a second episode in November 2005, and launched as its own primetime series in 2006, when the film takes place, before cancellation after its second season the following year. The show has re-entered the spotlight — see also the Sundance documentary Predators — because collective conscience has dropped the hammer on it as an impudent, unethical social experiment, akin to Precrime in Minority Report, in which suspects were actively baited into scenarios under executives who wanted more eyeballs on their network.

The ensemble nearly reaches flawlessness. Merritt Wever produces the show with an iron fist, utter lack of empathy, and incessant gum-smacking authority. Matthew Maher walks the tightrope between seedy crewmember and creep-who-hunts-creeps, never trustworthy, never dismissible. Phoebe Bridgers plays the show's original lone actor — a decoy who can disguise herself and her voice as a young girl or boy — with a cool, comedic bent. Tony Revolori is hauntingly pathetic as the show's first culprit. Bokeem Woodbine plays a small Texas town resident with militant intention, and Anna Faris, in a single scene as Hansen's wife, mostly stares at Chris with varying visages of disappointment and incredulity.

The performance hoorah belongs to Skyler Gisondo, largely absent from live-action film and TV since Licorice Pizza. As Dan Plumb, a new decoy actor inspired by Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade portrayal, Gisondo is essentially co-lead. Plumb arrives traumatized, gets mentally abused by the show's creators, and still develops adulation for them and passion for the work — "Nubile, hairless boy-man…that's your lane." Through Plumb, the film explains how someone like Hansen came to exist, why he placed meaning where he did, and why being "bigger than Lost" justified breaching corrupt ground for viewership.

Oppenheim's angle is unflinching. A24, according to the review in The Film Stage, insisted Hansen sign an uncharacteristically thorough NDA before screening the film for him in August; he refused and left. There is nothing redeeming here — Hansen is a shark — yet the film leaves ample material to unpack in Hansen, in the supporting characters, and in audiences themselves, the hungry masses such shows and films are made for.

We may not be personally responsible for one of the most dishonest shows ever to fuzz onto TV screens, but there is a reason it still gets discussed in depth twenty years later. If Oppenheim is onto something, we all have something to do with that.