David Osit attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Predators” at The Ray Theatre on January 25, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Robin Marshall/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Lucy Spicer
David Osit’s Predators is supposed to make you uncomfortable, but not necessarily in the ways you would expect for a film titled as such. It isn’t salacious, nor is it your typical true crime documentary.
“I don’t want the audience to go in with anything, really. Although I do like the idea that this film can be somewhat of a Trojan horse for people who like true crime but never really think much about why they like true crime,” explains Peabody Award–winning documentarian Osit during the film’s post-premiere Q&A on January 25 at The Ray Theatre in Park City, Utah.
The focus of Osit’s film, which screens as part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition, is the television program To Catch a Predator, in which host Chris Hansen confronted adult men who walked into sting operations thinking they would be meeting an underage girl or boy for sex. Prior to the operation, the men had been speaking with “decoys” — adults hired by the show who appeared younger than they were — over the phone or via online chat. Hansen would question the men on camera before “letting them go,” at which point they would be apprehended by law enforcement outside.
To Catch a Predator embedded itself so deeply in the cultural zeitgeist that it’s difficult to grasp that the original series only ran for three years, from 2004 to 2007. TV reruns certainly helped widen its audience, but the show’s influence spread in a way that surprised Osit when he looked into it. “One day, I discovered the online fandom community of the show, which, basically, for the last 20 years, has been cataloging through [Freedom of Information Act] requests and depositions all this archival material, this raw footage that no one’s ever seen before from the show,” recalls Osit. “And they put it on subreddits and forums and I watched some of it. That was the hook for me. I had this incredibly emotionally fraught experience [where] I would watch this raw footage and feel really bad for these guys, which is not the experience that I have when I would watch the show necessarily, but I’d feel really bad for them, and then I’d come back and read a chat log and be disgusted all over again.”
The documentary lives at the intersection of empathy and judgment. “What if I could make that sort of the spine of the film?” Osit remembers asking himself. “And have that experience transmitted to an audience as well?”
Osit’s film follows a three-act structure. The first act digs into the making of To Catch a Predator, including contemporary interviews with actors who played decoys. The second act focuses on the vigilante-style copycats who emerged to fill the void after the program went off the air. The third act sees Osit flip the script and interview Hansen about the legacy of the show that made him a household name.
Every time you find your judgment settling into a familiar binary (this group is good, while this other group is evil), Predators throws you for a loop. We’d like to believe that everyone working on shows like To Catch a Predator is motivated solely by the desire to protect children. “I believe that Chris [Hansen] genuinely believes in what he does to be good,” says Osit. “I believe that Chris has also made a career out of doing what he does, and the necessity of that means that he has to do both and do more of what he does for a career.” In an effort to advance their careers or grow their viewership, the creators of some programs resort to unscrupulous methods that have life-and-death consequences.
“Everyone has this sort of calcified sense of right and wrong that’s really hard to shift, and it’s even harder to shift with television shows telling us that that’s right and that’s wrong,” observes Osit. And that calcified sense of right and wrong tends to leave little room for meaningful discussions about rehabilitation or why these predators behave the way they do, despite how regularly Hansen receives queries on the subject. An audience member at Predators’ post-premiere Q&A asks Osit about it, too.
“I wish I knew enough to be able to prescribe an answer, but in a funny way, what Chris says during our interview is actually true — that we don’t have an easy way to deal with this because there are different kinds of people doing this,” begins Osit, before elaborating. “But also, I would just take a couple steps back — we don’t know how to talk about this problem. I didn’t know how to talk about this problem. I think most people don’t know how to talk about it. We also don’t have a social floor that can catch people who are ill and need help. We have police. We have reality TV. We don’t have a system that’s designed to catch the most vulnerable among us, especially if we’ve decided as a society that they’re evil or ill.”
