Filmmaker David Osit gives viewers a lot to wrestle with in Predators, his documentary about the reality show To Catch a Predator, which captured the zeitgeist of the early 2000s. In the show, host Chris Hansen confronted adult men who had arrived to a location (following an online chat correspondence) with the alleged intention of engaging in sexual activity with a minor. The set-up was, in fact, a sting orchestrated by the show’s producers in collaboration with local law enforcement. It made for compelling television and was advertised like so, as well as a public good. Predators wrestles with the legacy of the program, the ethical questions it raised, and the copycat vigilantes it inspired. The show was cancelled not long after suspect Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt committed suicide as cameras and cops were descending on his home. A cascading level of criticism was soon drawn against the production, putting into question whether the evidence obtained on camera was, in fact, admissible in a court of law. Hansen, after all, is not law enforcement.
Osit reveals a great deal of his own personal trauma in the film as a way of articulating his initial interest in To Catch a Predator and lingering need to understand why these adults want to harm children. Throughout, ethnographer Mark de Rond studies raw footage from the television show and attempts to make sense of it. Speaking of the show’s millions of viewers, he observes: “You see someone’s life end, and they realize it.” Unedited reactions prompt sympathy for these men, monsters though they may be. One woman who acts as a “decoy” (the actor who pretends to be the young child) for a crusading group of copycats struggles watching the footage, realizing she is seeing this person as human. She is a victim herself, she explains. Hansen sits down with Osit for an interview, and is challenged on the ethics of what he does and some of the results. His answers are refreshingly honest and thoughtful.
The title, of course, is provocative. Who are the real predators? Are those who watch and laugh at the plight of these most-likely evil men predatory in their enjoyment? Are those “concerned citizens” who devise amateur stings that play out in public places in order to ridicule and expose presumed pedophiles actually doing the right thing? Osit does well in presenting various documented situations that speak to the complexities of this particular kind of criminality.
Perhaps most striking are a series of interviews with the actors who played the decoys on To Catch a Predator for multiple scenarios. It’s clear how these performances have stayed with each and every one of them, a trauma all its own. The final moments of Predators break aesthetic form a bit in order to make a visual point that does not really land––an energy that feels misplaced. Nevertheless, Predators is a clear-eyed analysis of the cultural phenomenon, an earnest attempt at understanding why we enjoy watching these kinds of people get caught (apart from the obvious), and a reckoning with the morality of the whole enterprise.
Predators premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.