‘Predators’ Review: Engrossing Examination at How the Rise of True Crime Shows Revealed its Complicity [A] – Sundance Film Festival

If the phrase, “Hello, I’m Chris Hansen,” means anything to you, you are probably familiar with its source: To Catch A Predator. For the unfamiliar, the TV show, hosted by Hansen, ran on NBC from 2004-2007 and was focused on a simple goal: catching pedophiles and exposing them on national television. Seventeen years after its end, documentarian David Osit revisits the rise of the show and its aftermath to pose compelling questions about ethics, humanity, and whether our society is equipped to deal with the very real horrors of childhood sexual abuse and pedophilia. Predators is an engrossing – yet difficult to watch documentary that deals with the questions left in the wake of the show, and the tensions within the true crime genre that continue today.
Osit tackles his subject matter by segmenting it into three chapters. In the first segment, named after the show, the filmmaker uses raw footage from the making of To Catch A Predator, along with interviews with the former decoys, and an anthropologist to chart the show’s rise. The interviews with former decoys, actors who were 18 at the time but looked younger to lure in the show’s targets, are especially compelling and emotional. One decoy explains how the crew would prepare her before she was set to meet one of the pedophiles who’d be on the show. “You are like God to them,” they told her. “So when you point your finger at a chair and say sit, they’ll do it.” Another chimes in and confirms the sense of power it gave them at first: “It was kind of like a cool gang you were in.” However, the cost of this power is very high. One decoy mentions the high emotional toll the work took that ultimately led him to leave and never look back. “I just realized it was a game I didn’t want to play anymore,” he says.
The feeling of power and justice the show provided eventually gave way to real ethical doubts and disturbing consequences. Several of the former decoys talk about feeling uneasy about whether the targets of the stings were able to discern reality from fantasy. An unsettling chat drifts onto the screen, over raw footage of an episode and the effect is unnerving. After an infamous episode in Texas, where a target, who was also an assistant district attorney, killed himself when he realized he was about to be caught, the show ended. The raw footage from this day is especially chilling, adding to an unsettling atmosphere the film builds around itself throughout. Hansen’s reaction to the suicide is unnervingly cavalier: “Better he did it when they [the officers] were coming in,” he says to the crew.
Predators does a miraculous job of complicating the narrative of To Catch A Predator and other copycats who’ve flourished online recently by digging into the most asked request on the show from Hansen to the targets: “Help me understand.” It’s a plea that – Osit is most interested in, because it’s that question that made him a viewer of the show in the first place. As a survivor of childhood sexual assault, Osit reveals that he wanted to understand why a person could do something like this to anyone else, let alone a child. The problem is, the show was never interested in providing or facilitating that understanding.
Tensions between the show’s motivations connecting entertainment and public service are examined throughout the documentary in various ways. In the second segment, we’re introduced to one of the many online content creators who’ve decided to take up Hansen’s mantle. Skeet Hansen and his team of DIY predator hunters add even more texture and complexity. One of the team members, T. Coy “the Decoy” is also a survivor of childhood sexual assault and sees her work as vital to protecting children from what she went through. Yet, when a target shows up at one of Skeet’s sting operations and becomes suicidal, the cracks in the infrastructure of entertainment as a public service begin to show. No one is equipped to get this man help, or to really get to the larger problems behind his actions. The presence of shows like To Catch A Predator and the copycats it spawned are simply unequipped to deal with an issue like this beyond providing schadenfreude and a brief sense of respite. “People like to compare themselves to the depraved to feel better,” a producer at Hansen’s new, true crime centric network, TruBlu says at one point. Even Hansen admits, in an interview at the end of the film, that he has no answers: “We point our cameras at something and the trauma continues.”
Predators doesn’t have any concrete answers either, but it is starting a vital conversation that most true crime-centric stories wouldn’t even dare tread. The discomfort it provides is important, and forces a reckoning of sorts – what do we want from true crime, and can we even get it?
Grade: A
This review is from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival where Predators had its world premiere. The film is currently seeing U.S. distribution.
- ‘Predators’ Review: Engrossing Examination at How the Rise of True Crime Shows Revealed its Complicity[A] – Sundance Film Festival - February 1, 2025
- ‘The Dating Game’ Review: Violet Du Feng’s Relationship Doc Struggles with the Balance of Political and Personal [C] – Sundance Film Festival - February 1, 2025
- ‘Brides’ Review: Innocence is Lost as Two Girls Fall Prey to Extremism in Nadia Hall’s Empathetic Story [B] – Sundance Film Festival - January 31, 2025