The riveting documentary Predators comes built-in with extra degrees of difficulty as it seeks to become that old cinematic chestnut, an empathy machine, attempting to forge some measure of basic human recognition while chronicling the history and cultural footprint of a titillating show that was foundationally built on destroying empathy. Directed by David Osit, the film is a thoughtful and thought-provoking work that serves as an intellectual interrogation of Dateline NBC’s To Catch A Predator, the pioneering telemagazine crime show which from 2004 to 2007 broadcast sting operations capturing opportunistic, would-be sexual exploiters seeking encounters with underage kids.
From frame one, Predators rejects any lurid nostalgia play. It opens in deeply unsettling fashion, throwing its audience into an emotional deep end by way of unadulterated telephone audio in which a man makes plans for a sexual rendezvous with a baby-voiced actress, under footage of a camera crew readying its sting house. From there, we’re straight into captured footage of one such prevented encounter, this time of a 37-year-old guy visiting a girl posing online as a 13-year-old.
Predators unfolds in three sections, with Osit interweaving occasional conversational rumination from British-Dutch ethnographer Mark de Rond, who weighs in on the appeal of watching these men being debased. The first part charts the wildfire-like spread of the show’s enormous cultural relevance (“Punk’d for pedophiles,” as Jimmy Kimmel glosses it), launching its host, Chris Hansen, into the media stratosphere.
Interviewees include three of the older teenage “decoys,” Dani Jayden, Casey Mauro, and Dan Schrack, who posed as minors, typically 12 to 15 years old, in online chats and phone calls. One describes the experience as initially like being part of a cool club, but in inventorying their memories fissures begin to show. As Predators winds its way toward a November 2006 operation in a small town 25 miles north of Dallas that would end in tragedy, law enforcement officials with feelings of both pride and regret are interviewed. So, too, is Texas reporter Byron Harris, whose local investigation kicked off some self-reflective national reporting on the show’s methodology.
The film’s second portion examines To Catch A Predator‘s legacy through the lens of its current copycats, and in particular 30-year-old YouTuber Skeeter Jean, a self-described Hansen impersonator who fronts what he calls the “Predatorial Investigation Unit.” This involves embracing a budget version of his inspiration’s working model and sometimes calling law enforcement but mainly generating content “for the clicks,” freely, even proudly, showing how to embellish videos in order to make them more believable.
This leads to one of the year’s most surreal scenes. After an ensnared man begins to spiral and possibly even evidence thoughts of suicide, Jean solemnly tells him, “You’ve just been skeeted.” Meanwhile, Osit, in one of his few onscreen appearances, attempts to engage with the guy in order to ask him to sign a release for his movie. The man declines, saying, “I don’t want to look back at myself as the person who was stuck in this.” Jean and his crew’s inability to handle the collateral human damage of their endeavors is bracing, and asks how different it actually is from Hansen’s show, when both aim to wrap a public service up in a package of retributive entertainment.
Predators ends by focusing on Hansen himself, who in the years since his original show’s cancellation has crafted a cottage industry out of similar online-takedown investigations, building a 400,000-plus subscriber following on YouTube and co-founding TruBlu, a crime-oriented streaming service. “People like to compare themselves to the depraved to make themselves feel better,” says TruBlu co-founder Shawn Rech. Touching on everything from a CrimeCon appearance by Hansen to the grey morality of one of their stings (involving an 18-year-old contacting a 15-year-old), Predators builds to a pointed but not contentious interview with Hansen about his work and the legacy of the show, in which the host eloquently uses victims’ “thank yous” as a shield against more substantive criticisms.
Despite the heavy subject matter, Predators unfolds with a certain stealthiness and at a remove. It’s the opposite of a polemic. In examining the show’s commodification of humiliation, and its swaggering moral certitude, Osit focuses in particular on raw footage, particularly post-arrest, which shows a humanity that is hard to ignore. Of course, this footage was never broadcast.
Osit deploys this with a simple and unobtrusive style, making good use of composer Tim Hecker’s score. Yet, if there’s a knock on Predators, it’s that the film could use more narration. Osit’s previous work (Building Babel, Mayor) tends to use people as a way to plumb big issues and conflicts that feel unanswerable—like the Ground Zero mosque controversy, or governance in occupied Palestine—and that’s still the case here, where he implicitly connects the aforementioned copycat takedown with a later sense of unpacked regret and uncertainty over his project. But this journey requires a buy-in that may be too high a hurdle for some without a clearer articulation of Osit’s thought process. And yet, Osit successfully straddles the line between a strong tripartite structure and more open-ended cinematic essay (possibly thanks to his background as an editor). The binding, clear question in these approaches is whether there is entertainment value to be found in someone else’s suffering. If so, at what cost?
Against the modern American canvas of cruelty, there may be no more radical individual act than sustained empathetic identification. Many films are praised for not telling an audience what to think. But in forcing a viewer’s roiling, complex feelings inward, Predators is also asking audiences to sit with cruelty, and ponder how contributive, even in a small way, they might have been—as well as just how deep their own personal reservoir of compassion might be.
Director: David Osit
Release Date: September 19, 2025
