Primetime Review: Oppenheim's Sting-TV Nightmare

The film opens in 2006. Dateline NBC correspondent Chris Hansen (Pattinson) has a modest idea: work with an online watchdog group, Perverted Justice, to catch adults who show up at a decoy house expecting to meet a minor. The first sting is small, almost amateurish. But the ratings are enormous. NBC wants more. Hansen wants more. And the operation grows - bigger houses, more cameras, higher-profile targets.

We watch from inside the control room. Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), a producer who keeps asking the ethical question no one wants to answer. Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), a young segment editor who treats the footage like a drug. Del (Phoebe Bridgers), a Perverted Justice volunteer whose quiet rage is the film's moral center. And Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the group's founder, who sees Hansen as a vessel for his own crusade. Then there's Bill Conradt (Alex Winter), a district attorney in Texas whose refusal to cooperate becomes the film's third act - a slow, horrifying escalation that turns a ratings stunt into a death investigation.

Oppenheim shoots the film like a thriller, not a procedural. The control room is lit in monitor-blue. The decoy house is shot with the flat, fluorescent dread of a Saw trap. When Hansen walks out from behind a corner to deliver his catchphrase - the one everyone knows - the film doesn't play it as a punchline. It plays it as a ritual. Pattinson, doing a quiet, almost uncanny impression of Hansen's calm cadence, makes the host a fascinating void: a man who believes he's a public servant until the moment he realizes he's a TV star. Wever is the film's conscience, and she sells every ounce of her character's growing nausea without a single raised voice. Gisondo is genuinely scary as a kid who thinks he's editing a hero story. Bridgers, in her first major screen role, is a revelation - still and watchful, a person who has seen too much and expects nothing good.

The script, co-written by Oppenheim and an uncredited team of researchers, resists easy villains. The predators are pathetic, not monstrous. The journalists are ambitious, not evil. The cops are complicit, not corrupt. That grayness is the film's strength and its occasional weakness - there are moments in the middle hour where the ambiguity starts to feel like evasion. But Oppenheim knows how to build dread. A sequence involving a police radio and a missed phone call is more terrifying than most horror films this year. The final twenty minutes, which dramatize the Conradt standoff, are shot with a cold, unblinking stillness that left my screening silent.

It's not a perfect film. The 109-minute runtime drags in the second act, and a subplot about Hansen's family life feels like a concession to conventional biopic tropes. But Primetime isn't trying to be a biopic. It's trying to be a mirror. And it succeeds, uncomfortably.

Pros

• Robert Pattinson's controlled, creepy performance anchors the film.
• Oppenheim's direction turns control rooms and sting houses into spaces of genuine dread.
• Merritt Wever and Phoebe Bridgers give the film an emotional spine.
• The final act is a masterclass in slow-burn tension.

Cons

• The middle hour loses momentum with repetitive sting sequences.
• Some ethical questions are raised and then dropped.
• The Hansen family subplot feels like padding.

Primetime is not a fun watch. It's not meant to be. It's a film about how television turns people into characters and then punishes them for playing their roles. Oppenheim doesn't let anyone off the hook - not Hansen, not NBC, not the audience that made it all possible. If you want nostalgia for the 2000s, look elsewhere. If you want a haunting, well-crafted drama about the cost of catching monsters on camera, this is one of the best films of the year.