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‘Predators’ Review: David Osit’s Quietly Trenchant Documentary Asks What Truth Came Out of a True-Crime Phenomenon
David Osit's superb documentary 'Predators' examines the ghoulish NBC hit 'To Catch a Predator' and its cultural legacy over the last two decades.
With the assistance of a civilian volunteer group called Perverted Justice, producers would identify men seeking sex with minors in online chatrooms, using decoy actors to lure them to a secretly camera-rigged house where they would eventually be ambushed by Hansen and, later, local law enforcement. Osit is duly conscious that his own film, searching and humane as it is, nonetheless stands on that same lurid audience impulse — it opens tensely, after all, on sustained, stomach-churning audio and video footage from “To Catch a Predator” of a 37-year-old man engaging in verbal foreplay with what he believes to be a 13-year-old girl, before Hansen disrupts the scene. Psychological probing was never on the agenda: The slick, righteous pull of the episodes stands in stark contrast to remarkable, untelevised raw footage that Osit has uncovered of police rather more temperately interrogating the show’s targets after the initial capture.
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