Name: Primetime Review: Lance Oppenheim’s Debut Fictional Film Only Scratches the Surface — Review
Rating: 5

During Lance Oppenheim’s press tour for his fictional directorial debut, he made an interesting distinction between nonfiction and fiction filmmaking: the biggest intrigue in documentary filmmaking happens every day, and the uncertainty of what you’re going to catch is ultimately the most rewarding part. That certainly seems true given the subjects of his various documentaries, from renaissance festivals and sperm donors to, well, Elizabeth Holmes in his shock release coming later this October. Fiction, by comparison, requires the filmmaker to manufacture nearly all of that intrigue from what he has already created and collaborated on with his cast and crew. And watching Primetime, I found myself thinking about that distinction quite a bit, because Oppenheim’s first fictional film is overwhelmingly successful at manufacturing a world to look at, but considerably less successful at manufacturing a story that feels as compelling as that world.

The visual pastiche is easily the most overwhelming element here. Primetime is hazy, grimy, and uncomfortably sleazy-looking, as if Oppenheim didn’t just want to recreate the early 2000s but wanted to recreate the early 2000s through a busted 144p video file that should never be allowed to get upscaled for a home release beyond a VHS tape. It is remarkably committed to its neon palette and fuzzy digital photography, and while that kind of aesthetic can sometimes feel like a filmmaker straining for a certain effect, here it is at least consistent enough to become the movie’s identity. Among everything Primetime reminded me of, I kept coming back to Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice more than anything else – not because the subjects or filmmakers are particularly comparable, but because both films are interested in recreating a particular ugly cultural moment through an aesthetic that feels almost as important as the story itself.

The bigger surprise, though, is how Oppenheim approaches Chris Hansen. I went into this expecting a more overtly critical portrait of the To Catch a Predator host and figurehead, but Primetime is surprisingly willing to entertain the idea that Hansen’s relentless pursuit of making the show a household name ultimately validates the show itself. The ends justify the means, essentially, and the exploitation of the predators being caught is treated as a necessary evil to justify the work Hansen and his ragtag crew are doing. There is something inherently interesting about one documentarian/investigative journalist taking a relatively favorable approach to another documentarian/investigative journalist, particularly when last year’s Predators, directed by David Osit, took a more socially and morally complicated look at Hansen and the work he had done. But I’m not sure either movie has quite managed to dig past the surface of To Catch a Predator’s long-lasting impact, or even establish what that impact really was.

I was born in 2000, so saying I even vaguely remember the cultural impact in the moment of the show would probably be an overstatement, but that distance made me especially curious about what Oppenheim might uncover underneath the nostalgia. Instead, I was underwhelmed by how straight-to-story this is as a movie about the making of To Catch a Predator rather than a movie about the psyches, egos, and cultural forces that brought it to life. Robert Pattinson does everything he possibly can to make Hansen smug, obsessive, and aggressively dedicated to turning To Catch a Predator into the biggest thing since Lost, and he is very good at it. This is Pattinson’s third great performance of 2026, but the script doesn’t give him enough beneath that determination to make the obsession feel as consequential as the movie wants it to be.

The threat of a National Enquirer expose is a particularly difficult engine for the movie to get running in 2026. Celebrity scandals are cycled in and out of the news almost daily now, and the 24/7 news cycle has made the idea of one tabloid exposé potentially destroying someone’s career feel considerably less potent. It becomes difficult to understand why this particular threat should fuel Hansen into finding the country’s next nasty pedophile of increasingly higher political or cultural stature when the movie doesn’t really contextualize what makes this era of television so uniquely consequential. Oppenheim seems to want the audience to understand the cultural stakes, but rarely gives us enough to actually feel them as something more tactile or threatening.

He turns to another angle through one of the show’s decoy kids, nicknamed Decoy Dan and played by Skyler Gisondo. Gisondo is similarly really good, even if Dan is just as thinly written: a twenty-something trying to work his way up the ladder, get his SAG card, and figure out how to turn this bizarre job into a career. I liked this storyline in isolation, but the Hansen and Dan stories never quite work in conjunction with one another. They mostly work against each other, creating a more expansive version of the production of To Catch a Predator without making the overall story any more engrossing.

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The supporting cast does some compelling work around that. Merritt Wever plays a composite of television executives hellbent on doing whatever it takes for better ratings, while Matthew Maher is particularly funny and edgy as the crew’s online-chatroom vigilante, essentially cosplaying as young kids in order to lure out the biggest fish he can find. There is a strange, entertaining ecosystem forming around Hansen, and Oppenheim understands how bizarre this entire operation must have looked from the inside.

Ultimately, I thought Primetime fell flat. It goes for it visually all the way, and there is something admirable about how completely Oppenheim commits to making this grimy, neon, early-2000s fever dream look exactly the way he wants it to. Pattinson is excellent, Gisondo is good, and the supporting cast fills out the world with enough strange personalities to keep it watchable. But the first fictional film from a filmmaker who has built his career around observing real people feels oddly restrained when it comes to actually saying something about the people at the center of this story. There is an overwhelming amount of style here, but the script mostly runs through the motions of making To Catch a Predator without enough insight into why this particular cultural phenomenon mattered, what it did to the people involved, or whether its legacy deserves the nostalgia Oppenheim seems to be recreating. The movie looks like a fascinating artifact from another era; I just wish it had something more fascinating to say about that era itself.