Robert Pattinson Terrifies as Chris Hansen in Full Primetime Trailer

Charlie, the nebbish and ineffectual bridegroom in Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, and Antinous, the smug and oily would-be suitor in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, could not be further apart. However, they share two specific characteristics: they’re both played to the hilt by Robert Pattinson and they’re each in their own idiosyncratic way deeply funny performances.

Even so, I don’t think we’re going to be laughing if the first full trailer of Pattinson’s third major turn this year is to be believed. For here is a movie that’s positioning itself to be a quite uneasy portrait of our media landscape today, and as personified by American journalist, presenter, and To Catch a Predator crusader, Chris Hansen.

As the core subject matter of writer-director Lance Oppenheimer’s Primetime, Hansen remains a polarizing figure from the glory days of cable news journalism. His true crime sting series, To Catch a Predator, lived up to its title by luring multiple probable child predators into incriminating themselves on-camera by showing up to houses where they expected to meet a young teenager alone. But the methods in which the series recruited young actors to play prospective victims (or bait) for these men, as well as many other behind-the-scenes facets of the series, have raised controversy and questions of journalistic ethics. Some of the more unseemly details behind To Catch a Predator’s fall from primetime grace will undoubtedly be dramatized in the new film.

Yet watching the first trailer for Primetime, it is curiously less the “true story” element in this tale of a trailblazer that comes through. The real-life Hansen was a pioneer in the blending and bleeding of “news” with lurid reality TV-adjacent infotainment, but this movie seems to take on a more skewed and almost horrifying perspective while positioning Pattinson’s TV personality as an idol for his 21st century age with piercing, relentless eyes as he commands from on high Superman’s Skyler Gisondo to play the honeypot. 

We don’t know a lot about the film other than it counts among its producers Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen (who collaborated on Hereditary, Midsommar, Eddington, and Bugonia, among others), adding credence to Primetime’s apocalyptic and perhaps darkly satirical tone in the trailer. Yet the film also counts Pattinson among its producers, which is a first for the English actor. This suggests the material might be especially pertinent to the Batman actor who has seen up close the leer of a celebrity obsessed media.

We suppose we’ll know more after Primetime has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it will compete for the Golden Lion. The film, which also stars Merritt Wever, Phoebe Bridgers, Matthew Maher, and Anna Faris, opens everywhere else on Sept. 25.