Venice Film Festival 2026 – Primetime ★★★★

Released: 30 October 2026

Director: Lance Oppenheim

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Matthew Maher, Phoebe Bridgers

On the one hand, it’s kind of sweet that director Lance Oppenheim chose to dedicate Primetime to Jeff Baena. On the other, the movie has such a difficult and sensitive topic – the real-life chase of predatory paedophiles as one man’s quest to become the biggest thing on American television – that it might not be appreciated. But despite, or possibly because of, that difficult subject matter, Primetime is an expertly made thriller which knows to its bones the only thing worse than not getting what you want.

It’s 2006 and American television is in transition. As an exec puts it, Seinfeld and Friends are over, and no one really knows what’s next. But Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson, who also produced) and his producer Andie (Merritt Wever) have had a successful show for a while: To Catch a Predator, which did so well as a segment within a news magazine show that it became its own programme. The show secretly arranges for men who think they’ve been chatting with children online to meet those kids in person, but after a brief conversation with a young-seeming adult ‘decoy’ Mr Hansen appears instead. When the men walk out of the house local police are waiting for them, so whether or not all of this is entrapment is a grey area. The chatters are vigilantes, or activists, who call themselves ‘pervert hunters,’ namely Xavier (Matthew Maher, aka Black Pete from Our Flag Means Death) and Del (singer Phoebe Bridgers, whose casting is a very smart idea). Xavier is glued to various chat services (these are still the days before social media), while Del does the preliminary phone calls that reassure the men and greets the targets in the house, but she can’t do it all. Through auditions they come across Dan (Skyler Gisondo), a musical theatre fanatic who is very good at acting younger than his age. On his first day of work he’s thrown in straight at the deep end, so seriously out of his depth Andie thinks he’ll quit. But Dan has a union card to earn and he doesn’t like giving a bad performance for any reason.

In spite of the show’s success, Dan has not joined a happy workplace. Xavier dislikes Andie both personally and professionally and Del is burning out. Andie is so good at her job of keeping things running smoothly that the excellence of her work is practically invisible. She makes handling every little detail look so easy the men think she does nothing. In addition to being being taken for granted by her own team, other networks are trying to poach Andie for their own, lesser shows. Normally she wouldn’t even think about it but Xavier especially is being horrible. The local police they partner with tend to be thrilled to be in the public eye, which causes its own problems; Bokeem Woodbine as a Texas sheriff up for re-election who uses ‘Democrat’ as an insult is especially memorable. On top of all that Chris is preoccupied. His relationship with his wife Mary (Anna Faris in much too small a part) is disintegrating, partially thanks to all the travel but also due to an affair he is having, which isn’t going well. When he is home his idea of parenting is waking his sons up late at night to make them watch his show while he tells them how he’s going to be a huge success. Worst of all, the show opposite To Catch a Predator in the same prime-time timeslot, Lost, just added polar bears, which means they are under intense corporate pressure to keep their ratings up. It’s the perfect storm.

By which is meant, the mood of Primetime is unusually tense and off-kilter, feeling a lot like a hurricane about to hit. David Bolen’s cameras do a wonderful job mimicking the hidden-camera setups beloved of this kind of reality television. People are shot at unusual angles, with emphasis on the space behind them, or in extreme close-up. Most of the shots look and feel like a surprise, making it very difficult to look away. It’s unpredictable. There’s also a highly colorized, desaturated feel to virtually every shot that makes the entire movie feel like a haunted house. Days are brownish, nights are greenish. Monitors flicker. It’s disquieting. This is complemented by Carla Brenholtz’s makeup, which on everybody is always a little overdone and clownish. Noticeable, but not distracting, except that you wonder why no one can see everything’s a little off. It’s all unsettling and a big achievement by production designer Alex DiGerlando. The aural atmosphere is also equally good, with vivid use of “London Bridge” by Fergie as the movie opens, a recurring use of “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent, and a score by Ari Balouzian that emphasises the sense of looming disaster.

And under all of this is the work Mr Pattinson is doing as a man who sees his work as cleansing the world of evil. Because these other men are bad and he is good, everything he does is good and right. This manifests as a focus on the ratings to the absolute exclusion of almost everything else. Andie’s hard work, Dan’s safety, Del and Xavier’s business are all his just deserts. And of course the men who show up at the houses are the most disposable of all. Chris watches them squirm as he reads their chat transcripts to them, they are arrested, and then never thought of again. It’s hard to explain how Mr Pattinson makes Chris’s presence feel like an absence. All of this – the TV show, the careers of hundreds of other people, and the men seeking children online – is for his own aggrandisement. Yet Chris’ ambition is such that he is insulted when other people feel this is not real journalism, and the movie is designed to make us feel those insults are the real issue.

Of course, it’s hard to know whether or not this was ever real journalism. Singling out specific creepazoids (Tony Revolori and Alex Winter making the biggest impressions) while never looking at the bigger picture has always been a staple of local journalism. Just look at how the crime blotter of any small-town paper is its most popular section. The days of pillories in the town square are gone, replaced by reality TV, which of course has since been bulldozed by social media. At least with television and major networks involved there was someone to keep an eye on the legal side of things, though it feels like those protections barely feature now. But while stopping people (men) from doing what they think they can get away with is important work, it hasn’t exactly stemmed the tide of online child sexual abuse. Primetime, wisely, doesn’t touch any of the issues of the present moment with a bargepole. But that does mean the slimy hollow core of Mr Pattinson’s performance is only a representation of the slimy hollow core of the movie.

And somehow that is not a criticism. It’s actually very high praise. Mr Oppenheim and writer Ajon Singh have somehow looked into the heart of darkness without going blind, which means we can too. What Primetime really is about is how you go from being a good person into something else, step by step by step. Primetime knows how easy it can be to lose sight of the bigger picture, and the unfortunate fact that mistakes can get made which can’t be fixed. The fact all this is happening in public, in front of television cameras, with a guaranteed audience of millions – well, what could be more unmissable viewing? And don’t you want to know how it ends?