Predators Review – A dark, compelling look at the reality TV revenge hunt of child abusers | film

IIt’s too early to know for sure, but it may end up ranking as one of the best non-fiction films of the year. At least let’s hope a lot of people get to see this, even if accidentally because they meant to buy a ticket for Predator: Badlands. Instead of an alien hunter with evil teeth, this offers a deeply disturbing meditation on our collective thirst for revenge — or at least a kind of bizarre artistic version of revenge as offered by the reality TV show “To Catch a Predator,” an American series that ran from 2004 to 2007 that featured weekly footage of pedophiles and would-be molesters being tricked, exposed, and arrested.

Predators director David Ossett, initially just an off-screen voice but eventually a fully visible presence (quite literally), explains that he used to binge-watch To Catch a Predator as a young man. Each episode was roughly the same: a man is seen arriving at a suburban house, expecting to have sex there with a teenage girl or boy who is actually a hired actor who has seduced the target. Journalist Chris Hansen then emerges from behind the doorway to confront the target with transcripts of the interactions he had with the decoy. The target usually starts crying and begging for mercy; Then, in a final act of theatrical cruelty, he is told he is free to go only to be arrested seconds later by waiting law enforcement officers working the show.

At the time, Jimmy Kimmel, still in his infancy as a talk show host, happily described To Catch a Predator as “the funniest thing on television,” likening it to the prank show Punk’d “but for pedophiles.” But no matter how repulsive the “victims” are, nothing about the show or the situation seems funny now, especially when we learn about a suspect who killed himself when the cops arrived.

How can the punitive, ritualistic humiliation of To Catch a Predator, or any of the many gonzo-made copycats on YouTube, like the one we see being filmed here, help stop child abuse or change anyone’s life for the better? No one wants to think about how to break these cycles of abuse; Instead, we are all trapped in a veritable hall of reflexive brutality where predators are targeted by morally indignant predators armed with cameras and who are in turn filmed by quasi-predatory documentarians. It’s a Mis en abeme From despair.