Robert Pattinson is tremendous in this stomach-churning media satire

Robbie CollinSat, September 5, 2026 at 4:43 PM UTC

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Robert Pattinson continues his hot streak in the media satire Primetime - Primetime trailer

“There used to be a pillory in every civilised town,” huffs Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), Primetime’s all-American newsman  as he prepares for a broadcast. “Now there’s a television in every home, and I’m on it.”

Frankly, you’d rather take your chances with the mouldy veg. This stomach-sinking media satire is a fictionalised account of the making of the American current-affairs show To Catch a Predator, in which gullible perverts were lured to houses rigged with hidden cameras, and subsequently exposed to the world, on a promise of underage sex. Inspired by a 2007 magazine article about the series’ grisly conclusion the previous year, it is the best and nastiest film of its type since 2014’s Nightcrawler: it leaves its audience simultaneously appalled and thrilled, and thereby grubbily complicit.

Pattinson’s 2026 hot streak continues apace with his tremendous lead performance as Hansen, which accurately captures not just the real-life Hansen’s vocal inflections, but also the peculiar camp, panicky register of all US television news.

To warm up for a show, Hansen repeats lines from his quarries’ web chats, enunciating these tragic, seedy ramblings as if declaiming Shakespeare. It sounds absurd, but is also symptomatic of the broader problem director Lance Oppenheim’s film diagnoses. These roundly depressing reality-TV stings are being presented as genuinely high-value material: an ongoing public-interest investigation into child abuse. And through this muddying of categories, a deadly pollution is spreading through everyone the show touches, from viewers to the host.

Among its victims are the young actor (played bySuperman’s Skyler Gisondo) who serves as a credibly underage “decoy” during the stings, and who comes to view this grim gig as an electrifying blend of situationist theatre and dark folk ritual. Then there is Hansen’s shark-eyed producer Andie, terrifically played by Severance’s Merritt Wever, who is both a sufferer of the show’s moral contagion and one of its main super-spreaders.

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Early in the film, she and Hansen are elated when the head of the network promotes their show to a new time slot, opposite the sci-fi mystery series Lost. But this shift raises the stakes. For the 9pm crowd, the common-or-garden deviant simply won’t cut it, and the combing of chatrooms intensifies. When Lost brings on polar bears, Hansen realises he needs to start landing whales.

Oppenheim’s background is in documentary, and he infuses Primetime with a queasy cathode-ray sensibility that evokes news broadcasts of an earlier age. Colours blare, close-ups gawp: everything comes with a topspin of lunacy, and is all the more horribly plausible for it. The script often smooths out the facts to maximise entertainment – fair enough, you might say, given its subject – yet while Hansen’s fateful final investigation feels like something from the True Detective writers’ room, the salient details are all spot on.

And besides, who is grooming whom? The men that the show targets are awful, no question. Yet rather than catching predators, the show may be actively willing them into existence in order to give itself something to do.

“What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t been here?” Hansen often asks the exposed: a question Primetime pointedly leaves hanging. Maybe nothing at all. But maybe not.

Screening at the Venice Film Festival. UK cinemas from Friday, Oct 30

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”