Primetime arrives at the Venice Film Festival competition with Robert Pattinson channelling what director Lance Oppenheim describes as equal parts Jerry Maguire and Count Dracula — and the result, according to critics present for its world premiere Saturday, is the kind of performance that quietly announces an actor has entered a new period of their career.
Set in the mid-2000s and loosely based on a 2007 Esquire article, Primetime follows Chris Hansen — then host of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator — as he industrialises the pursuit of suspected child predators into primetime entertainment. The film tracks the ethical collapse that ultimately took the show off the air in 2008, ending in lawsuits and disgrace, and asks how a man who believed he was doing something righteous could have created something so fundamentally wrong.
The answer, Oppenheim suggests, is not that television is inherently corrupting — but that the desperation to fill an empty space with the lowest common denominator is where the rot begins. “We need the spectacular,” Pattinson’s Hansen tells his producer. “The best of the best.” As the film makes clear, that is an odd mission statement for a show nominally dedicated to protecting children.
What the Film Is and How It Works
Primetime opens as Hansen sits in the shadow of “serious” TV journalists — the Mike Wallaces of the world — feeling professionally overlooked, a man with something to prove. His producer Andie Bender, played by Merritt Wever in what critics are calling the film’s most finely calibrated supporting performance, is a professional whose standards bend further and further under pressure until they snap entirely in the film’s tense final act. And grounding the moral centre of the story is “Decoy Dan” Plum, played by Skyler Gisondo — a naïve actor who sees the show as a stepping stone to a SAG card and gradually becomes the lens through which the audience watches everything go wrong.
The film builds with deliberate claustrophobia, layers of cameras filming cameras filming cameras, until the show’s logic collapses under the weight of its own escalating requirements. An extra-marital affair threatens to derail everything. A groomer more sophisticated than the show’s usual subjects emerges from the internet. Hansen pursues him like Ahab after the whale.
Phoebe Bridgers, the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter making her acting debut as a decoy, is described by Pattinson himself as “unbelievable” and by reviewers as instinctively at ease with the material. At the press conference, Bridgers recalled her initial reaction to being asked. “When Lance asked me, I was like, ‘No way, dude.’ But it turns out, working with incredible people actually makes it way easier.”
Robert Pattinson at the Press Conference
At Saturday’s Venice press conference, Pattinson addressed the elephant in the room directly: Chris Hansen has been publicly critical of the film, which he says he declined to watch after refusing to sign an NDA from A24. Based on the trailer alone, Hansen said Pattinson’s portrayal is “overly dramatic” — though he acknowledged that his own family “seem to think it’s a pretty good imitation.”
Pattinson was gracious. “Obviously, I hope he likes the movie,” he said. “There’s something electrifying about him. I would hope the amount of inspiration his character has given a lot of people for years is some kind of compliment.”
On what drew him to Hansen as a subject, Pattinson was candid about the difficulty of defining what made the man and the show so compelling. “There’s a strange alchemy — something he’s doing is the reason people are still talking about that show 20 years later. It’s not to do solely with the subject matter. It was something about the show that was groundbreaking, but then he’s someone centering it. There’s something, even after watching literally thousands of hours of it, you can’t put your finger on it.”
Pattinson also cracked that the intensity of his shooting schedule — he came to Venice from London, where he is currently filming The Batman: Part II — had occasionally blurred his characters together. “I can definitely hear a little Chris Hansen in The Odyssey when I watch it,” he said with a laugh.
On sustaining the pace of his current career — which has included The Odyssey, Primetime, an upcoming Dune: Part III, and the Batman sequel — Pattinson said momentum was key. “When you get the momentum going, it’s strangely not that hard.” He also offered a more practical explanation: “I just had a baby. I had no desire to go out at night, so suddenly I had twice as much time, which was helpful.”
What Critics Are Saying
Early critical response has been broadly positive, with particular enthusiasm for Pattinson’s performance and the film’s tonal precision. The most frequently cited comparison is Nightcrawler — the Jake Gyllenhaal film that also centred on a man who turned camera access into a moral emergency — though Primetime operates with more formality and period restraint. Some reviewers have noted it shares thematic territory with Danny Boyle’s Ink, also in competition at Venice this year, as another film about a media figure whose populist instincts corrode his integrity.
The review in this publication finds the film “a stylish, almost Shakespearean meditation on ambition” that resonates in the current moment — when, as the reviewer writes, “countries all over the world are turning persecution into sport, with no thought of judge or jury.”
Primetime is distributed by A24 and runs 1 hour 50 minutes.
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