What happens when a documentarian makes his first fiction feature about television? You get a film in which every charge the critics file reads, from another angle, like a description of the method. Lance Oppenheim is thirty, formed entirely in nonfiction, the HBO series Ren Faire behind him and an Elizabeth Holmes film co-directed with Nathan Fielder ahead, and Primetime, his first scripted picture, released by A24 from a screenplay by the equally first-time Ajon Singh, takes as its subject Chris Hansen and the Dateline NBC machine of To Catch a Predator. Robert Pattinson plays Hansen. The reviews are split down a line so clean you could light it: everyone admires the surface, and everyone files the same complaint about what is under it.
The texture is the thesis
Begin with what the film is unarguably good at, because it is the documentarian’s inheritance. The AP’s reviewer describes a picture buzzing with dial-up internet and the hum of grainy VHS, a mid-2000s mediascape rebuilt down to its signal noise, and the filmmaker crowd has noticed: the r/cinematography thread on this film is literally titled with the question of how Oppenheim gets his pictures to look the way they do. The opening scene, as reported, is the whole project in one exchange. A cornered man in Long Beach, arrived to meet what he believed was a child, asks what his fate will be. The electric chair? No, says Pattinson’s Hansen, striding into frame: Dateline NBC. A sentence of pure dread, and note who delivers the cowering half of it: Tony Revolori, the gentle heart of The Grand Budapest Hotel, cast precisely so the audience’s reflexes misfire. The AP calls that casting more than a hint at Oppenheim’s sympathies and reaches for Charlie Brooker’s old line about the original program, that when a show makes you feel sorry for potential child-rapists, it is doing something wrong. The film, by every account, lives inside that wrongness on purpose.
The real-world machinery appears with its own faces. Jeff Zucker, the former NBC Universal chief, plays himself, telling Hansen he personally dislikes the show, scheduling it anyway, Wednesday nights against Lost, and thereby demanding fresh blood. A fiction film that convinces the actual executive to perform his own programming decision is doing something documentary never quite can: getting the confession in character.
The charge sheet, filed twice
Now the prosecution, and it arrives in stereo. The AP: coming from nonfiction, Oppenheim delivers neither a strong dramatic thrust nor deep portraits; the film sits in judgment of its characters, a fair perspective but not one prone to three-dimensionality; vividly realized but predetermined. Two and a half stars. Justin Chang, quoted in that same cinematography thread: a shallow exploration of To Catch a Predator with a richly portrayed protagonist. Two critics, one verdict, almost to the word. D’accord, the pattern is real, and I will not pretend otherwise.
But look at what survives inside the complaint. Both critics concede the protagonist is rich, and the AP’s account of the performances around him is close to a rave: Merritt Wever’s producer, so casually good at the manipulation her job requires; Phoebe Bridgers, in her first major film role, an uncannily natural presence; Skyler Gisondo and Matthew Maher filling out the ecosystem of decoys and vigilantes. And Pattinson, in the AP’s reading, owns the film outright, an anxious adjudicator hunting a bigger whale while a National Enquirer reporter circles with an exposé of his own, a man who sits quoting, maybe relishing, the chat logs of the people he destroys. The year’s pattern holds: tightly outlined roles, the AP notes, are where Pattinson’s edge-blurring goes furthest, and after The Drama and The Odyssey this is his third of 2026 to prove it.
Is shallow the flaw, or the subject?
Here is the question the split verdict begs, and I will answer it rather than dodge. A director raised on documentary knows one thing in his bones: footage does not owe you interiority. The people in To Catch a Predator were never three-dimensional on screen; that was the show’s cruelty and its appeal, human beings flattened into a damning close-up and a voiceover, judged by millions who knew them for ninety seconds. A fiction film about that machine which granted everyone rich inner lives would be lying about its subject with every frame. Oppenheim’s refusal to go deeper than the screen, the quality both critics name as the limit, is at minimum a coherent position and at most the entire argument: the film treats its characters the way television treated its catches, and makes you feel the temperature of that treatment. The AP itself reports the line that carries the thesis, Hansen’s own: there used to be a pillory in every village; now there is a television in every living room. A film about pillories perhaps cannot also be a film about souls.
What that position costs is real, and the critics are right to invoice it. Predetermined is the word that stings most, because dread without surprise asks a great deal of two hours, and the AP points anyone hungry for the full history toward David Osit’s documentary Predators instead, which is its own quiet verdict. Enfin, a first fiction feature that earns comparison to Nightcrawler on theme while being outpointed by an actual documentary on depth has found exactly the border it lives on.
The verdict
On the evidence assembled, Primetime is a film whose method and whose limitation are the same object viewed from two sides, and I come down, with reservations noted, on the side of the method. A period mediascape rebuilt to the hum of its tape, casting used as a moral instrument, the real executive performing himself, and a lead performance both camps call the richest thing in the picture: that is a great deal of filmmaking for a debut in a new form. The depth charge will matter more on his second fiction feature, when the subject is no longer a machine that flattens people, and we learn whether the flatness here was a choice or a ceiling. For now the documentarian has made the film his training implied, about the one subject where that training is an argument rather than a habit.
Some of my notes for this one come from the Associated Press’s review and the threads on r/cinematography and r/JeremyJahns.