Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques. 

Scrolling TikTok, X or even the front page of the news, it’s easy to think that the United States has slipped into a uniquely cruel era of endless gawking and thinly-veiled pornography. Across the country, slack-jawed viewers toggle between videos of Ukrainian drones slamming into huddled soldiers, attempted or realized political assassinations and “pick-up” videos filmed with secret cameras and obviously disturbed girls. But as “Primetime” (2026), Lance Oppenheim’s compelling thriller based on television host Chris Hansen’s life, reminds us, American society has long thrived off public humiliation.

The movie recounts the years up until Hansen’s infamous pedophile-hunting show, “To Catch a Predator,” came to an end after one of the “predators” committed suicide — a story originally told in a lengthy 2009 “Esquire” article. Hansen appears as a self-convinced hero, played by a frightening Robert Pattinson. He is matched by Andie Bender (Merritt Weaver), a slightly more sympathetic but ultimately ruthless producer who—perhaps even more than Hansen—is driven by pressure from NBC executives. Hansen also mentors a boyish actor nicknamed “Decoy Dan” (Skyler Gisondo), who draws the show’s predators into the stage-set houses, where a well-rehearsed Hansen confronts them.

The movie is a vivid time capsule of the 2000s, a period when liberal and conservative America alike were far more confident in their self-righteousness. Besides “To Catch a Predator,” the other major entertainment on offer was the ongoing Iraq War, played on TV as a remote-controlled shooter game or as a triumphant courtroom drama. Self-righteousness is backed up by the creeping militarization of American life, seeping in from abroad: police toting assault rifles and riding in armored vehicles. 

Hansen’s show is the apotheosis of the wider cultural landscape. Not so much lurking but leaping out of “Predator” is the tendency towards life-as-content; the confusion of acting with the real thing; everyday life lived in bad faith.

This sort of willful existential confusion leads Hansen to believe his job is not so much exposing small-town perverts as it is unveiling the ultimate evil of the world. He doubles down on his career as his personal marital troubles compound. This delusion leads Hansen into dangerous territory. Oppenheim does a masterful job of entertaining Hansen’s megalomania as the TV host pursues a politician he suspects is a predator. Eventually, “Decoy Dan” is drawn into the deadly serious fun of it all and grows into Hansen’s role. In one memorable scene, the Manichaean struggle takes on an undeniably Lynchian tenor: we are thrust into a dreamlike world of strange, pitiful predators; toy blues and oranges caught in dark shadow; voyeuristic camera angles; and an overwhelming dread of unknown, possibly universal, origin.

Hansen has convinced himself that the source of this dread is out somewhere in the world. He is egged on by his assistants to believe that vicious pedophiles lurk at every level of society. Every community has its outcasts and perverts, but they don’t emerge (as Hansen believes) out of some primordial gash in the earth. Darkness does not exist out of space and time, but it does multiply before our blinking, blinded eyes as we root around for it. 

“Primetime” is larger than life, but only because Chris Hansen was determined to portray himself as larger than life. It is not really a pleasurable watch, or at least not in the voyeuristic, addictive way that “To Catch a Predator” is. Everybody —  from Hansen to his cronies to the pedophiles they chase — evinces a desperate discomfort. Oppenheim does not want us to wring the same guilty pleasures we do out of reality TV.

I didn’t leave the theater feeling implicated — I don’t spend my time stitching together TikTok edits, and I stopped watching clips of “Predator” a long time ago. But as the credits rolled, I did feel perturbed and victimized. One of television’s — and, eventually, the internet’s —  effects was to render private life impossible. We constantly exhibit ourselves. Occasionally, a movie like “Primetime” comes around and reminds us of the punishment of our constant exposure. It’s not dissimilar from the monotonous, nervous misery of being online. In “Primetime”‘s funhouse world, the possibility of turning away from the spectacle is never on offer.