Worth seeing:

as a thought-provoking, morally ambiguous drama about a TV host trying to catch sex pests to boost his own ratings

Director:	Lance Oppenheim
Featuring:	Robert Pattinson, Skyler Gisondo, Alex Winter, Anna Faris, Bill Heck, Bob Ari, Bokeem Woodbine, Eric Rahill, Franco Brocato, Jeff Zucker, Jessica Hecht, Jonathan Lipnicki, Luca Brocato, Matt Smith, Matthew Maher, Merritt Wever, Michael Chachere, Owen Campbell, Phoebe Bridgers, Sean Bridgers, Tony Revolori, Victor Brunette
Length:	109 minutes
Certificate:	15
Country:	US
Released:	30th October 2026

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) hosts a popular show in which he lures paedophiles to a house – rigged with cameras – and then exposes them to the world, with police waiting outside to arrest them.

His team includes a researcher, Xavier (Matthew Maher), who hunts the predators in chat-rooms and two decoys (Phoebe Bridgers and Skyler Gisondo) – actors who pretend to be teenagers, to lure them towards the cameras – and justice.

Gisondo’s Dan had been looking for an acting gig and is a little put out when he realises what he’s got himself into and his friends aren’t convinced he’s made the best career choice.

The show gains traction among audiences and soon, the NBC network promotes it to a new primetime slot. But when the ratings don’t keep up with expectations, the team needs to find a big fish to reel in more viewers.

WHAT’S IT LIKE?

At the heart of this disturbing film is a fascinating character – it’s never clear whether Chris Hansen’s true passion is catching paedophiles to protect children or simply boosting his own public profile with a top-rated TV show.

It soon becomes clear to him that if you put your head above the parapet, there are people who will try to shoot it. But he battles on – to catch more predators – and fight the mystery thriller Lost for viewers.

At the heart of this supposedly altruistic endeavour, it turns out – unsurprisingly, perhaps – that Hansen isn’t the only person who’s really in it for himself. A rival TV network is trying to poach his producer and his new “decoy” really just wants a foot up in his acting career. That said, egos aside, the team always pulls together when the network ups the pressure. If they’re going to move up in the world, they’re going to do it together and if they want bigger ratings, they’re going to need bigger predators.

There’s a real sense of dread as this creepy TV host enters the living room and the slow-motion car-crash of the realisation that they’ve been caught spreads across the faces of divorcees, rabbis, even politicians. Literally caught on camera, there is no-where for them to hide – as becomes all the more evident by Lance Oppenheim’s use of split-screen to show the views from multiple cameras around the house. The director’s history of documentary making is evident. And casting a handful of familiar – and usually empathetic – faces among the targets adds to the frightening sense that you never really know who someone is.

It’s a veritable moral maze, as you watch the calculated, manipulative stings, the intricacy of the entrapment, as the paedophiles are lured away from the comfort of their computer to the lair of a vainglorious TV host, it almost makes you feel sorry for the predators and you have to shake yourself and remember why they were there in the first place. The predators clearly had criminal intentions, but in these set-ups, are there actually any victims? Hansen and his team are taking it upon themselves to clean-up the streets and protect potential victims from child abuse – but are they creating the very criminals who might otherwise never have taken their depraved thoughts beyond their bedrooms?

While questions are raised about Hansen’s own private life – although in an entirely different arena – this film is content simply to put the frighteners on him, without letting us see the consequences.

This could, perhaps, be explained by the fact that by the time the final credits roll, the film seems to switch focus entirely and reveal that Hansen was little more than a secondary character in someone else’s story.