The Story
Before he said “take a seat,” Chris Hansen had to decide whether the cameras should keep rolling.
It is 2006, and cable news has discovered a new kind of spectacle: a suburban house wired with hidden cameras, a decoy typing to strangers online, and a host stepping out of the kitchen shadow with a stack of printed chat logs. To Catch a Predator turns entrapment-adjacent journalism into appointment television — and its clean-cut host into the most recognizable interrogator in America.
Primetime goes inside the machine. Lance Oppenheim, the documentary filmmaker behind Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, makes his narrative feature debut with a psychological thriller about the people who build the sting house, the actor hired to play bait, and a host chasing ratings, legacy, and something darker he can’t name on camera.
Robert Pattinson stars as Hansen in a performance built from tics, teleprompter cadence, and fluorescent dread. The question the film keeps asking is the one the network never aired: when the show becomes the story, who is hunting whom?
