Robert Pattinson’s very big year is continuing with Primetime, a highly anticipated new thriller in which he plays famous paedophile hunter Chris Hansen, who spent years confronting child predators on the ethically and morally dubious US entertainment show To Catch a Predator.

Ahead of the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, A24 has unveiled the first proper look of the movie, which marks the feature debut of documentarian Lance Oppenheim.

Pattinson plays Hansen as a crazy-eyed martyr with what seems to be a bit of a God complex, while he’s supported by Emmy winner Merritt Wever as his producer and Righteous Gemstones star Skyler Gisondo as an actor hired to play a 13-year-old boy in a paedophile sting. Musician Phoebe Bridgers also makes her acting debut in the film, while Scary Movie star Anna Faris plays Hansen’s wife.

The movie is inspired by the enormous success of To Catch a Predator, which began in 2004 first as a single segment on the US magazine show Dateline NBC, before being spun off into its own series. The show saw alleged child predators lured into the homes of children they’d been communicating with online, unaware that the children in question were actually adult crew members of the series pretending to be underage.

Hansen would famously emerge from the shadows in each home to confront the men who’d been targeted by the show. Men were found with help from the now-defunct watchdog group Perverted-Justice, which was known to scour internet forums to find instances of adults engaging in sexually explicit conversation with children, or arranging meets with them.

To Catch a Predator proved a controversial sensation, with Hansen becoming an overnight star. But the show was swiftly cancelled in 2008 when a 56-year-old assistant district attorney killed himself in his home shortly after a sting involving a fake child had taken place, with crew members from To Catch a Predator capturing the suicide on camera.

The show previously served as inspiration for the acclaimed documentary Predators, which was released last year.

Hansen has spoken little of Primetime, beyond a cryptic exchange with newscaster Jesse Weber on the magazine show News Nation in May.

“[Pattinson’s] an actor, right? Young, talented guy?” Hansen asked before being shown a clip of the film.

“I mean, he sounds a lot like you,” argued Weber. “Did you have any idea about this? Did you have any working relationship with this?”

“We had heard that there was something like this in the works,” Hansen replied. “They reached out to me this week, and I’ve been asked not to talk about it a great deal at this point.”

When Weber suggested Pattinson’s impression of Hansen was fairly accurate, Hansen somewhat agreed. “Little bit,” he said. “Very dramatic.”

Primetime marks yet another sharp turn in a sensational run of projects for Pattinson, following his appearance in this year’s The Drama as a terrified Englishman convinced his fiancée may be insane, and his role last month as Anne Hathaway’s sneakiest of suitors in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

He’s also due to star as another villain in Dune: Part Three in December, and has a Denzel Washington thriller called Here Comes the Flood in post-production, too. He’s currently filming the long-awaited sequel to 2022’s The Batman, which will finally hit cinemas in early 2028.

Primetime will be released in the US on 25 September, with a UK and Ireland release this autumn.