R Patz may not have hit the five films in 2026 milestone that A Hath has, but his third film out of four this year might just be his best 2026 performance so far.
Some films favour an opening monologue, whether that takes the form of spoken word or a barrage of on-screen text to set the scene. Maybe even both. But Primetime? Not so much. You do get speech, sure, and you also get images on the screen, but the words you’re hearing are emanating from an unseen source, and what’s appearing on the black screen is just a series of film distribution companies. You know the actor who’s saying the words, because his face is plastered all over the promotional posters, but still, you don’t actually see the main man straight away. As the rehearsal lines of Chris Hansen (played with typical aplomb by Robert Pattinson) start to occur in the soundscape multiple times across the film, they become familiar. Not a comfortable kind of familiar, but a kind of unsettling sonic motif to let you know that the main man’s still in control.
Watching is on display from the start. Characters watch other characters from the safety of TV screens while we the audience are also watching this voyeurism take place. It’s a transparent filming style that director Lance Oppenheim employs very effectively. But it’s voices, or rather the pitches and tones of the voices, which are really the stars of the show. When you’re thrown into a film that doesn’t provide you with easy opening explanations, you have to rely on the less expository stuff. And while there’s plenty of dialogue spoken by the main characters, it’s how they say it, the form, that really opens up the intrigue rather than the content. We know that our main character’s a scumbag before we start watching, however much the film is or isn’t going to try to glamorise him.
But it’s how he wields vocals as a weapon to make the audience engaged. Pattinson unsurprisingly put in the effort – and the Method – to mirror the real-life Hansen’s tones. Beyond listening to Hansen’s podcast around 100 times and reciting lines as he listened (adding an extra kind of level to the lines we listen to Pattinson – as Hansen – rehearsing in the film), he went to that next step of staying in character off-camera to keep the complexity of Hansen’s complex vocal tones as authentic as possible. There’s a great sequence where Pattinson’s doing some particular vigorous work with his jaw while listening to a phone call, with Oppenheim noting the transformation in the actor’s facial movements.
The vocal performances don’t stop there, though. Merritt Wever delivers a powerhouse performance as Hansen’s producer Andie Bender just based on pitch alone. If voices were violins, hers would be a particularly sonorous one, particularly as she coerces naïve actor Dan Plum (later nicknamed by Hansen as Decoy Dan, also adept with his vocal intonations) into joining the immoral crew. There doesn’t seem to much online about their voice preparations, but they’re equally impressive. All of these voices become an orchestra of sound that make the main three trio stand out. There’s no voiceover to politely push the viewer along for the ride. It’s these sounds, and the dedication to their vocal quality, that elevates Primetime into a compelling and uncomfortable sphere of sonic spectacle.