.jpg)
Robert Pattinson Playing Chris Hansen in A24's Primetime Should Not Work This Well
A24 made a fever dream about To Catch a Predator
I have a big interest in true crime. Like, a genuinely embarrassing amount of my screen time goes to it. And To Catch a Predator is one of those shows I fell down a rabbit hole on and never fully climbed out of. The printout. The "why don't you have a seat." The cookies on the counter while some absolute ghoul realizes his life is over on national television.
So when I found out A24 was making a movie about the show with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, in what has apparently become the year of our lord Robert Pattinson, I was seated before the trailer even finished loading.
Now, this movie is weird. Genuinely, gloriously, art-house weird. It's shot to look like degraded early-2000s TV footage, grainy and boxy and drenched in this cold blue haze that drops you straight back into 2006. It's not really a biopic. It's a fever dream about ambition, spectacle, and what happens when doing the right thing gets tangled up with wanting to be the most famous man on television. And Pattinson is so good in it that I forgot I was watching Pattinson.
TMJ Rating: 📽️📽️📽️/5
What You Need to Know
It's 2006. Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) is hosting To Catch a Predator on Dateline NBC, luring child predators into a house through online chats, confronting them on camera, and handing them to the cops waiting outside.
The show is a monster hit. And Hansen wants more. He wants primetime. He wants to go head-to-head with Lost. He wants respect, ratings, and immortality, and the movie quietly asks whether his motives were ever as pure as he needed everyone to believe.
The film splits its focus across three people: Hansen, his relentless producer (Merritt Wever), and a struggling actor named Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) who takes a steady gig playing one of the decoys and slowly loses himself in it. Anna Faris pops up as Hansen's wife. Phoebe Bridgers is in here too, in what's basically her acting debut.
What Absolutely Worked in A24's Primetime
Pattinson. My god.
He doesn't wear prosthetics, doesn't change his face, doesn't do a single obvious biopic trick. He just becomes Hansen through voice and posture and this deranged messianic energy that builds all movie long.
There's a mirror scene where he's pulling faces at his producer that made my whole theater lose it. He plays the on-camera saint and the off-camera mess and the man who genuinely believes he's fighting an ancient evil, and he sells every layer. If he doesn't at least get nominated, I'm rioting.
But the real gut-punch is Skyler Gisondo as Dan. I did not expect the decoy to be the soul of this thing, and yet. He's a wannabe actor who wanted representation and a paycheck and instead got thrown into the most psychologically warping job on earth, pretending to be a child so grown men can incriminate themselves.
Watching him slowly dissociate, watching the gig eat him alive, is where the movie finds its actual heart. He goes from eager to determined to completely hollowed out, and it wrecked me.
Merritt Wever, as the producer in A24's Primetime is doing so much with restraint. She's the one keeping this whole machine running, addicted to the adrenaline of it, half-sick over what she's enabling and unable to walk away. And the film is surprisingly, uncomfortably funny. Not making light of the subject, more finding dark comedy in the reactions and the sheer insanity of the production.
Where It Lost Me
The three-way split is the problem. Hansen, the producer, the decoy, all fighting for space, and none of them fully getting the room they deserve. Every time the movie leaned toward something genuinely profound, it pulled back. I kept feeling it was about to go deeper and then it would change lanes.
The affair subplot in Hansen's personal life is the weakest thread by a mile. It feels bolted on, like they needed one more reason to show him unraveling and didn't trust the show alone to carry it. You could cut it entirely and lose nothing.
And the ending. Oh, the ending. This is a story with 20 years of aftermath, and the movie raises a dozen questions about where these people ended up and then simply stops. No epilogue, no resolution, nothing. I walked out wanting to sprint to Wikipedia because the film refused to tell me anything. Some people will love that ambiguity. I wanted more.
It also never once turns the camera on us, the audience. A movie about the sickness of watching this stuff for entertainment never asks why we couldn't look away. That felt like a missed opportunity the size of a house.
My Final Verdict
Pattinson is career-best. Gisondo is a revelation. The aesthetic is immaculate, and the whole thing crawls under your skin in the way only genuinely strange, uncomfortable cinema can.
But the unfocused script and that abrupt non-ending keep it from the greatness it's clearly reaching for. It's a good movie that flirts with being a great one and keeps flinching at the last second.
Still, I'd watch it again, and I'd tell any true-crime-obsessed friend to see it with a big loud audience.
Have a seat. You'll want to.
