‘Primetime’ is Peak A24, For Better or Worse

When the final credits of Primetime rolled, announcing that that film was “based on a true story” (with “certain details…dramatized”), I was shocked. The basis in truth and the dramatization were obvious, but could what held them together really be described as a story? 

What, after all, is the movie Primetime about? Ask any of the characters in the film and you would get as many answers. For Chris Hansen (played by Robert Pattison), the host of NBC’s hidden-camera reality show To Catch a Predator (2004–2007), it’s the story of the high point in his career and his Icarian quest to go further in pursuit of becoming a network news anchor. For his producer Andie (Merritt Wever), it’s a disastrous tale of hubris topped by a botched opportunity to join a far better show at a rival network. For Dan (Skyler Gisondo), To Catch a Predator’s 23-year-old “decoy” who passes for teenaged to lure potential predators into confrontations with Hansen, it’s about the long hard road to getting taken seriously as an actor. For the researchers helping plan the show’s sting operations, it is a quest to ensure potential sex offenders never harm a real child. These wildly different motivations are granted equal weight in Primetime—which is to say, it takes none of them seriously. Lance Oppenheim’s film holds its subject matter at a half-ironic arm’s length, playing every scene for laughs even as it insists that what’s happening onscreen matters – a condition I can only describe, for want of a better adjective, as so A24.

Did I mention that Primetime was produced by A24? The midsize American studio is responsible for financing (and, even more importantly, distributing) movies as stylistically diverse as the viral horror hit Backrooms, cringe-comedy chamber piece The Invite, and the loosely biographic feel-good summer romance Tony—and that’s just in the past 6 months. Yet there’s no denying that its heavily branded corporate persona revolves around a leaden mass of prankish, bombastic, and emotionally inuring movies that seek to locate the midpoint between Jackass and the Criterion Collection. 

Primetime checked every box on my A24 bingo card. Luridly colored and shot on at least three different cameras, it’s set mostly in suburban conclaves of flyover states and revels in depicting the local populace as grotesque losers. A surprisingly solid supporting role by a well-known performer but first-time actor (in this case, Phoebe Bridgers) and selective use of facial prosthetics both appear just long enough to undercut the film’s sense of reality. Antic and frantic, it telegraphs an almost aggressive sense of meaninglessness. Other recent bingo winners include Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025), Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (2025), and Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme (2025). All three of those directors have had a hand in the younger Oppenheim’s career, so it’s not surprising that he aspires to be like them. But he repeats a formula that’s starting to feel a little tired, and says more about the people behind the camera than the story in front of it.

Primetime’s failure is not for lack of talent. The best part of this film—and therefore, the most frustrating to see flail amidst its wreckage—is Pattinson. Primetime may be his strongest performance to date, one clearly deserving of a far better movie. Though Pattinson’s post-Twilight career has been touch-and-go for me (he’s too beautiful to play regular people, and often delivers his lines with a cryptic weightiness that lends itself better to vampires than it does to mere mortals), he clearly dug deep for this role, perfecting Hansen’s newscaster diction and steely sense of self-regard. As that other recent A24 film The Drama (2026) made clear, Pattinson reaches new depths when portraying characters brought low by their desperate need to be liked. Here, that quest is so toxic that someone literally dies as a result. One wouldn’t expect a person as venal as this movie’s hero to care, but should the audience? Primetime intends to shock viewers with its climax while at the same time proudly flaunting its own indifference to such things as life and death.

A self-absorbed go-getter who practices his lines in the mirror between kung fu gestures, Hansen is a dull caricature of what we already expect a network TV host to be like behind the scenes. Where is the subtlety? More to the point, why did this man (who is based on a real, living person) choose to spend his life hunting down and shaming would-be pedophiles on camera? Primetime can’t offer an answer, or at least one that it ventures to take seriously. Instead, the film loses itself in a messy bog of behind-the-scenes infighting, as producers and decoys jockey for position when To Catch a Predator briefly lands a coveted slot on primetime TV.

At only 30 years old, Oppenheim is already a well-regarded documentarian whose run-and-gun style has yielded some spectacular moments of unscripted cinema. Primetime is his first narrative feature. There’s perhaps no one better equipped to understand how a hidden-camera reality show was made, the level of artifice that goes into making something so “authentic,” and the level of artifice needed to take it a step further and make a movie about that. It’s not surprising, then, that Primetime hits its stride in moments during the show’s production, when best laid plans meet the moment and everyone holds their breath. Hiding beneath this bacchanalia of people’s worst instincts is another, better film about cooperation and the collective flow state achieved by making something happen in real time. It’s a nice feeling, and maybe Oppenheim will make a movie about it someday. In Primetime, it is just one more note in an overcrowded and underbaked mélange of anxiety, insecurity, sadism and schadenfreude.

Primetime is set for release in French cinemas September 23.