For a movie about the newsmagazine Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series, Lance Oppenheim’s film, shot by cinematographer David Bolen, has a fittingly murky, garish look: The color tint is florid and too bright, while the backgrounds are fuzzy and dark. It’s interspliced with footage from video cameras strategically placed throughout the locations, which the crew views on TV monitors in another room, recording the ongoing stings with quiet glee. For those who aren’t familiar with the show’s premise, the setup is this: A sexual predator, lured by online messaging and phone calls from adults pretending to be underage, arrives at a house where a crew is filming. Once the perpetrator admits to something actionable with the pretend underage victim, host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) emerges from the wings, smoothly and smugly admonishing the predator. The film explores the origins of the reoccurring segments, its main players, its quick rise to ratings glory, as well as its ethical quandaries.

The show (and the film) is often an unnerving, queasy experience led by Hansen, portrayed with precise, impressive mimicry by Pattinson. Like most prominent media figures, Hansen is career- and ego-driven and under pressure from the network to deliver ratings. Busy and having an affair with another woman, his home life in Stamford, Connecticut, is strained. (In the tawdry, dog-eat-dog nature of the movie’s portrayal of the media, the National Enquirer is on Hansen’s heels with this extramarital affair story.) Barely seen onscreen, his wife (Anna Faris) looks almost comatose, lying upright in bed late at night as Hansen promises her that he will be more attentive to her and the family.

Hansen is a quietly sinister presence here—amoral, cool, impersonal. Pattinson, who often strains to become chameleonlike in his roles—such as the cartoonish titular character in Mickey 17 and the sneering, villainous Antinous in The Odyssey—is convincing, perhaps because so much of Hansen’s job is calculated and performative as well: rehearsing lines to himself and asking for multiple takes when recording.

The film is at its most darkly comic when relaying the pop-culture detritus of the mid-to-late-aughts (Fergie’s suggestive “London Bridge”; Jared Fogle on a Subway poster, years before being exposed as a child pornographer). It also captures a time before streaming and smartphones, when network TV was still a stronghold, going through significant changes with the emerging popularity of reality television. The ratings competition is heated; an NBC bigwig notes that ABC is already planning duplicate investigations in the same vein. Meanwhile, the military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan hums about in the background with a glossed-over, infotainment feel as NBC newscaster Stone Phillips (Bill Heck) comes off as hollow and overly polished while delivering the news of the day.

The first half is its strongest, moving along with pep through snappy editing by Daniel Garber, following the origins of the episodes, including the casting of principal player Dan Plumb, later dubbed “Decoy Dan” (Skyler Gisondo), a twentysomething who changes the register of his voice and poses as a young boy to lure the predators as the setups are being recorded. Dan, a freckled, nervous, struggling actor desperate for his big break after only appearing in a Toys “R” Us commercial, emerges as one of the more intriguing characters. As does stressed-out, gum-chomping Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), a fictional executive producer who wears many hats, orchestrating everything behind the scenes—at one point, she feeds Hansen lines through an earpiece. As slick as Pattinson is in the lead role, Hansen starts to take a backseat as the storyline unravels. Ultimately, Gisondo and Wever’s characters and performances emerge as the most compelling and multidimensional.

As it hurtles toward its conclusion, a setup of a sting in Texas in an attempt to trap a prominent Texas district attorney (referred to as “the whale,” as clues infer that the target could be a big, media-grabbing figure) goes awry. The film, too, perhaps intentionally, starts to lose control. It becomes broader and more over-the-top, with sudden action-picture clichés (the sheriff loading his giant gun, with loud, steely sound effects), melodramatic lighting, and Hansen seeing ghostly visions. The film falters as it veers into unneeded tendencies toward overwrought flourishes, including a false-feeling Hansen freakout and big melodramatic swings in Ari Balouzian’s score.

Ajon Singh’s screenplay, while sometimes biting, never goes anywhere as profound as it seems to be implying; its observations often remain at surface level. This is in stark contrast to David Osit’s potent and chilling 2025 documentary Predators, which covered similar ground in a far more restrained way. Still, Primetime is mostly a well-constructed, luridly entertaining picture, an uneasy experience that is nonetheless skillfully edited and impressively performed.