Why are you here?: Predators Film Review

With incredible nuance, David Osit’s Predators interrogates the ghoulish business of making entertainment out of justice. Centred on the world of ‘online predator investigations’ built by the sensationalist TV series To Catch a Predator, Osit’s documentary hones in on the moral weight rested upon Chris Hansen and the producers of its various iterations. 

Criticisms of Hansen’s programs have long been growing in an undercurrent of the conversations around law enforcement television; his shows are thinly veiled exercises of propaganda and sadism, and they provide no solution to the issue they’re exploiting for content. Predators provides these arguments in their most emotionally and narratively compelling forms. 

One of the most fascinating aspects covered by the documentary is how the people who had a hand in either To Catch a Predator or its descendants reflect on their involvement. Viewers of the show had the privilege of not having to see its subjects as people at their lowest moment; the show’s form intentionally makes it impossible to. However, those involved at the time didn’t get the same privilege. While some express degrees of guilt and trauma, others interviewed in the film either have well-rehearsed rationalizations or stay clumsily ignorant.  

A memorable moment is when Casey Mauro, a young actress cast in the impossibly heavy role of underage decoy for To Catch a Predator, describes one subject of the show who was in his early 20s (around her real age at the time) that she sympathized with for a moment as they both related their struggles of finding a path in life. “I wanted to tell him to leave,” Mauro says to Osit.

Osit describes that his initial interest in Hansen’s show was the proposed question of what drives the potential predators that appear on the show. Predators strongly poses that To Catch a Predator was never really interested in that question. By emulating so much of the show's format and form to argue against its execution, Osit offers a seat to Hansen and turns his leading question against him: ‘Why are you here?’