PREDATORS (2025)

This review may contain spoilers.

This certainly asks a provocative set of questions, among them: what are the limits of human empathy? What role should public shaming play in punishment (or rehabilitation)? Is there an ideal relationship between the media and law enforcement? What is the social function of a program like To Catch A Predator (and its copycats): to serve as entertainment, to play a role in deterrence, to provide catharsis for victims, or something else? What would meaningful justice look like for survivors of child sexual abuse? Do the accomplishments of civilian sting operations justify vigilantism? Why are there so many pedophiles in America anyway, and what drives them to do what they do?

The footage David Osit has assembled for this documentary does a fantastic job of demonstrating just how bad a job we've done, as a culture, with reckoning with any of these questions thoughtfully. The only problem is that Predators itself doesn't make much progress in the direction of a meaningful or principled answer either—it problematizes excellently, but it stops short of supplying insight or wisdom. And over time, the film's focus on Hansen's program starts feeling like the wrong tree to bark up: it's a symptom of the problem, yes, but you can only scrutinize the symptom from so many angles before you start to realize that it's not getting you any closer to a cure. (This is why the academic ethnographer on hand never seems to have anything perceptive to say, and also why the final sitdown between Osit and Hansen feels so peculiarly inconclusive: there's nothing left to perceive in the endlessly replayed footage, nothing left to be meaningfully sifted from Hansen's stock answers.) 

To his credit, Osit seems to know that he's reaching a dead end, and the film has to settle for being "about" the questions and their unanswerability (we close on a shot of Osit's face, looking dissatisfied and contemplative). This establishes a discomfiting feeling that the documentary is clearly aiming for, but it also feels like something of a cop-out. After all, although we may not live in a world where these questions have easy answers, we do live in a world where one could find experts who actually do have profound insights about pedophiles and their psychology, or to find everyday people with a principled understanding of justice, or to find activist groups working meaningfully with survivors of sexual violence. Opening up to a wider set of voices could demonstrate a genuine concern with engaging with this set of difficult questions instead of just heaping them into a mass. But we can't let go of the impulse to place Hansen at the center of this tangle, as though he were the holder of the key to an otherwise unsolvable riddle.

At worst all this staring into the moral abyss can feel like we are beginning to partake in a form of the very sensationalism the film purports to critique, a form that retains the barest figleaf of respectability—call it "elevated sensationalism." (It seems willing to accept that it might be guilty of this, too: consider the moment where the film crew tries, mid-sting, to gain consent to film an entrapped predator; consider the difficulty they have explaining how exactly their project differs from that of the YouTuber they're shadowing.) And now an even more sensationalized version of this story has just reached theaters (the entertaining-looking yet plainly lurid Primetime, which just opened to a 19.2 million debut weekend). I don't think the world is worse for these versions, but I do think the world would be better if we got a more serious version as well, one more committed to looking squarely at the social problems here—problems which genuinely matter to a vast number of people—and making a sustained attempt to reckon with those problems with the force of conviction.

A ★★★ review of Predators (2025)

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