Sundance 2025 Review: ‘Predators’ and 'Mad Bills To Pay' (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
Veronica is back with our yearly Sundance coverage.
Sundance 2025: Predators Review
Predators reveals that To Catch A Predator and its modern YouTube byproducts allow for a free pass to buy into the police state and exploitative entertainment founded on useless, fumbling nods to interpersonal justice.
Predators director David Osit spent a lot of his time in college watching NBC Dateline’s To Catch A Predator. He’s one of millions to do so, myself included. To Catch A Predator is a longstanding cultural phenomenon, reliant on the notion that there is something obviously satisfying and schadenfreudian about watching people with intent to sexually abuse children be publicly humiliated and then arrested.
Osit was interested in To Catch A Predator for personal reasons. As he began to understand that he had been sexually abused as a child, he turned to To Catch A Predator for potential illumination on what made child sexual abusers tick. “Help me understand,” Chris Hansen often asks of the cornered pedophiles.
Osit’s striking new documentary Predators is also seeking clarity, only this time the mirror is reflected at those who have turned predator-hunting into a lucrative entertainment business. “Help me understand,” Predators asks. What is the purpose and value, exactly, of To Catch A Predator and its legacy? Predators is not so much an exposé on a single person or cultural artifact than on an entertainment loophole allowing the masses to partake in some of our most conservative cultural consumption behaviors guilt-free.
Predators is divided into sections: a section on To Catch A Predator, a section on its modern day YouTube knock-offs, and a section on Chris Hansen’s newest offshoot programming “Takedown With Chris Hansen”, which streams on his crime-oriented digital platform, TruBlu. Osit speaks to many involved in the creation of To Catch A Predator, including police officers, the actors who played the decoys in the sting operations, and eventually Chris Hansen himself. He shadows YouTube predator hunter Skeeter Jean, or “Skeet Hansen” through one of his DIY predator sting operations.
All arguments for programs like To Catch A Predator run along the same track: it’s educational for concerned parents and it both humiliates and legally punishes the most objectionable kind of bad guys. It’s clean cut. Certainly no one is going to want to hear out, or God forbid defend, pedophiles. But Predators reveals that this pedophile-catching content mostly benefits some of our most flawed systems. At one point in Predators, a moderator at a promotional event for Chris Hansen’s latest predator-hunting venture gleefully praises the audience for their participation by stating, “You are the best law enforcement tool in America.”
In the eyes of these shows, the audience is on one hand a tool to enforce justice, and on the other hand, a cash cow for modern Hansen-copycats who often rake in over a million views per sting operation, regardless of how sloppily they operate. During one predator hunt, a suicidal mark sobs for two hours in a hotel room while a cameraman with a beaded friendship bracelet reading “Batman” films impassively. Self-described Chris Hansen impersonator Skeet Hansen awkwardly informs the mark that he’s “just been Skeeted”. This hardly seems like a shining example of doing the good work; if anything, the practice is one of giddy cruelty instead of meaningful justice.
Predators does not suggest that we have to hold pedophiles more gently (though a handful of the documentary’s subjects admit to feeling pangs of empathy), but reveals that To Catch A Predator and its modern YouTube byproducts allow for a free pass to buy into the police state and exploitative entertainment founded on useless, fumbling nods to interpersonal justice. To Catch A Predator and its offshoots aren’t making pedophiles disappear. I have no interest in being “the best tool in law enforcement” or watching the content equivalent to creeps on TikTok filming people in crisis for clout, or even worse: masking their vigilante justice as activism or social good.
Help us understand, Predators asks. If the purpose is to catch these men and show to the world that they are unsafe, why hasn’t child sexual abuse been obliterated from our culture? How do the people making these programs and videos justify acting as an arm of the law for the sake of entertainment?
Despite all the time Osit spent watching To Catch A Predator in his youth, he never felt he received any clear answers. The revelation of Predators is that much like the pedophiles cornered on their shows, Hansen, his cohorts, and his copycats all fail to have a meaningful answer for what, exactly, their show meaningfully provides. Predators’ mindful disassembling of this slice of our zeitgeist is remarkable.
Sundance 2025 Review: ‘Mad Bills To Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)’
Mad Bills To Pay' is a modern dose of social realism.
In Joel Alfonso Varga’s directorial debut Mad Bills To Pay, (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), protagonist Rico (Juan Collado) is equal parts charming and stubborn
Like most nineteen year olds, he’s optimistically convinced that things will simply work out for him. But adulthood is creeping towards Rico in the form of Destiny (Destiny Checho), his rather poetically named teenage girlfriend, and her unexpected pregnancy.
Mad Bills to Pay is a technically simple story, a modern dose of social realism following Rico as he straddles the line between adolescence and adulthood, still having to explain himself to his mother, still tattling on his sister, still living at home, but soon responsible for a family of three.
Mad Bills To Pay is matter-of-fact about present-day working class life, particularly as a non-white person living in heavily policed New York City, without disparaging any of its characters. Rico’s family often fights directly or indirectly about the ways in which their precarious finances affect their personal life: lobbing around accusations of working too much or too little, swiping money from each other, drinking and staying out to avoid when life becomes too heavy. Varga allows the fights to play out again and again, often for a longer span than would appear economical. The same tattling between siblings or bickering between partners tumble forth repeatedly in a single scene. The effect is one of realism, an understanding that this is how things go in this household. But these repeated arguments (and their eventual fading) also allow for the practical care the family provides for each other to hold more distinct weight. Love is evident in Rico’s mother feeding and homing Destiny, in Rico taking a crappy job at a coastal fish restaurant to prove to his family and Destiny that he’s stepping up. The bickering will be let go. The love will always remain.
The women in Rico’s life often speak to him in groups, a Greek chorus of sanity pushing back against his more absurd conceptions—ideas like not getting his child vaccinated or making enough money for a family of three solely by selling unlicensed alcohol on the beach. Destiny, Rico’s mother, Andrea (Yohanna Florentino), and Rico’s sister, Sally (Nathaly Navarro), are played with skill by their respective performers — where Rico hears only their raised voices as signs of nagging or tattling, most of what they speak is, in reality, desperate pleas for him to internalize the weight of the upcoming shift in his life.
But Rico is mostly idealistic and flighty, dodging any whiff of pragmatism from the women in his life, and failing to see the gravity of his incoming fatherhood. He repeatedly insists that he and Destiny have eight long months to work it all out. In that time he envisions that he’ll have a car and a home for Destiny and their baby (who he hopes to name Riley, as in from The Boondocks, or Tetsuo).
Despite Rico’s unwarranted confidence and frequent stumbles, one doesn’t feel smug, but instead quite sad, during the flashpoint moments in the film where Rico is obligated to grow up or learn his lessons. This is helped in part by Varga emphasizing the many ways Rico “learns lessons” that are unnecessary and due in large part to his lack of resources and his racialized identity, but much of this patience with Rico also comes from Collado’s deft performance. Collado imbues a quiet vulnerability that never fully comes to the surface—Rico’s internal wounds and moments of distress are all informed through a quickness of breath or a stony face. Rico’s repeated, cyclical song-and-dance about how he’s going to care for Destiny and his baby, that it’ll all work out, is offered with such pleasant earnestness that it seems he’s convinced himself more than he has any of his family.
Rico’s life is one of cycles: fighting and making up with Destiny, finding and losing a job, paying off some of his legal fines and then getting fined again. This is both a tragedy and a comfort. Mad Bills To Pay’s final moments are sober, but there have been enough rhythmic cycles shown throughout the film that it doesn’t necessarily feel pessimistic. It’ll heal up again. And then it will fall apart. And then it will heal up again. The bills are due each and every month. We live with these rhythms, for better or worse.