‘Predators’: Sundance Review

Dir: David Osit. US. 2025. 96 mins

The world seems a much easier place if you can divide people into heroes or monsters.  David Osit’s sharp, compelling documentary Predators! seeks a more nuanced understanding of human nature as it charts the sensational impact of the hit NBC true crime series To Catch A Predator. Vigilante justice delivered as primetime entertainment, the show left grave concerns around ethics and responsibility. Predators may not find all the answers, but it offers a thought-provoking exploration of the questions and should attract audiences fascinated by the morality of the media and the complexities of crime and punishment.

None of this is straightforward

To Catch A Predator ran from 2004 to 2007 and employed youthful-looking actors to lure unsuspecting sexual predators to a moment of on-camera reckoning. Once entrapped, they were met by suave, paternalistic host Chris Hansen and confronted with the horror of their intended crimes. Police officers awaited them as they left the building.

Osit’s use of split screen images, raw footage, phone transcripts and recordings provide a queasy reminder of how the predators (exclusively male) operated as they charmed, encouraged and groomed victims  (female and male) they believed to be 13 or 14 years-old. There is an instant hit of complicit gratification when they are caught. Osit was a viewer at the time and remains fascinated by the predators’ own response to their public humiliation and why it was never possible to understand their motivation. Branding them as evil made it easier to think of them as something outside our experience rather than a fellow human being.

Dividing the film into three chapters, Osit offers a detailed investigation of a show that made Hansen an audience favourite as judge, jury and executioner. He casts his net wide in terms of subjects and perspectives, interviewing some of the young actors employed as decoys twenty years ago as well as police officers, former Kentucky Attorney General Greg Stumbo and ethnographer Mark de Ronald. Hindsight casts the show as a queasy blurring of the lines between justice and entertainment with the police uncertain if they were working for the public good or the television network’s benefit. A notorious episode involving a suicide spelt the beginning of the end for the programme.

The second chapter, entitled Copycats, charts the many To Catch A Predator imitators that populate YouTube in shows marked by dizzy, handheld camerawork and righteous anger. “Skeet Hansen” is a brazen, cut-price version of the original Hansen seeking “clicks and likes”, for example. What has been missing until now is an interview with the unflappable Chris Hansen. That happens in the third chapter, entitled Takedown, where we discover he is still a predator hunter for the Tru Blu network. Time has done nothing to cool his zeal or make him doubt his judgement. The ends always justify the means, regardless of who might be caught in the crossfire.

We never learn the fate of any of the men caught in the public glare of the show. The respectful, probing tone that Otis adopts never judges but instead invites the audience to draw their own conclusions about what the rise and fall of To Catch A Predator tells us about modern society. He ultimately reveals the reason why this matters so much to him, adding a personal dimension  to the acknowledgment that none of this is straightforward.