SUNDANCE: ‘Predators’ Offers Messy Insight

In terms of investigate journalism, few programs have had the cultural impact of To Catch a Predator. Predators (2025), a documentary that premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, takes a critical eye to the appeal and practices of the televised sting operations. A film like Predators is an inevitable response to the popularity of To Catch a Predator. To its credit, director David Osit’s documentary asks hard questions. Nevertheless, Predators lacks the structure or commitment to completely confront its subject in a satisfying manner, only providing some of the answers to those hard questions.

For the uninitiated, To Catch a Predator was a reality television program that ran as part of Dateline NBC from 2004 to 2008. Hosted by Chris Hansen, the program aimed to engage potential sex offenders online via a decoy that would pose as a child. The decoy would then lure the predator to a house rented by the production, where Hansen himself would confront them, be told they’re free to go, and then arrested by law enforcement on standby.

Predators understands the purported appeal of the show. What To Catch a Predator was supposed to do, as opined by filmmaker David Osit, was provide catharsis by seeing dangerous people with unspeakable intent get put away. But does To Catch a Predator actually accomplish any sort of catharsis? That question forms much of the backbone of Predators, which has a structure split into three parts of varying insight.

Predators breaks the lasting impact of To Catch a Predator down in three unequal parts.

The first part is an investigation into the show itself. Working with clips from the show and never-before-seen archive footage, David Osit edits together a fairly cohesive portrait of the show as it truly was. Predators frames its subject as a form of entertainment bordering on the barbaric. The documentary emphasizes that the chat logs were enough to have the offenders jailed already, so going through with the whole charade is for no other reason than to bait the predator into their ultimate fantasy and have the audience laugh or cheer with delight as they’re caught on camera.

Although disappointingly few crew from the Dateline NBC series sit for interviews, Osit does manage to get three of the decoys who appeared on the show to speak on their experience. One of these decoys expresses how, upon realizing how wounded and sick one of the people she was baiting truly was, he wanted to tell him to run away before Chris Hansen showed up. This is one of the film’s more insightful aspects, interrogating whether To Catch a Predator was really about justice. Was this really about helping these sick individuals rehabilitate themselves, or was this a freak show parading people at their lowest for amusement?

The excellent second part of Predators examines this question even further as David Osit moves into the world of modern-day To Catch a Predator clones. Through his investigation, Osit finds a world of morally bankrupt content creators who are biting the format for no other reason than to torment people for others’ amusement. In a harrowing moment, a Chris Hansen wannabe who has christened himself “Skeet Hansen” has no idea what to do when one of his subjects appears to be completely mentally unwell, even verging on suicidal.

He fumbles around on the phone with the police, only reluctantly getting them over to do a wellness check. After the man is taken away, Skeet only shows empathy because the man had expressed being a fan of his show. In just one scene, Predators makes it abundantly clear the real impact To Catch a Predator has had, and it’s an ugly one. It’s mystifying, then, why David Osit made the third part of his film the way he does.

The third part of the film sees the filmmaker sitting down with Chris Hansen for a chance to air all the grievances about the series. But Hansen stonewalls him, giving PR-trained responses that bring the documentary no closer to reaching a truth about the man who set a dangerous precedent. Of course, Osit cannot control the answers he gets. But that doesn’t mean it should’ve concluded the project. “The man who created the subject of this documentary is proud of his work and refuses to really dive any deeper” is a deflating note to go out on.

Predators would’ve been better off sticking to where it was the strongest by sharing Osit’s findings on the show’s production ethics and its negative influence. As it stands, Predators is a frequently intelligent, multi-faceted look into televised predator hunting that holds itself back in its final stretch. The Sundance documentary comes very close to being a definitive investigation of To Catch a Predator, but a few key stumbles leave it being a merely good attempt.

Predators premiered as part of the Sundance Film Festival 2025.