Predators
(2025 | USA | David Osit | 96 minutes)

In his surprisingly reflective documentary, David Osit revisits Chris Hansen’s salacious Dateline sting operation To Catch a Predator.

For those too young (or sheltered) to remember the show for themselves, the primetime news-adjacent programming was like a prank show for sex pests. Each episode found a sex predator and then lured him to a house full of cameras with a young actor who’d spent months portraying a vulnerable underage kid through through calls and instant messages. When the guy would show up, he’d meet the actor, only to have their lurid “date” quickly crashed by reporter Chris Hansen and a camera crew. After a brief interview, they’d reliably try to flee the house only to be tackled by cooperating law enforcement lying in wait outside the house.

Although the show ran only for a few years in the early-2000s, it had an outsized impact on shaping the public’s perception of the dangers of then-emerging online spaces. Osit interrogates the way the show’s influence has outlived its time on television, extended beyond the handful of years that the strange fusion of entertainment and exposure of online child sex criminals played in primetime.

With a personal touch, he brings uncomfortable empathy and uncommon curiosity to considering the show’s goals, its legion of online imitators, and the viewing audience’s insatiable appetite for this type of programming. We get to see how copycats continue to use the format for extralegal entrapments with even less finesse than the original. Chris Hansen even shows up, still a player in this space, and less reflective than one might have hoped after all these years. In constructing this portrait of a flashy format whose underpinnings were left unexplored, we’re asked to confront the queasy mix of news programming with law enforcement, the impact of the show on the people who produced it (especially the “decoys” used to lure in these men), and the genre’s appeal to righteousness over any attempt at understanding.

Predators played as an official selection of the US Documentary Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It has additional screenings in Park City and Salt Lake City throughout the festival and is also available online for the public (January 30–February 2)