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Sundance 2025: Predators, André is an Idiot, Marlee Matlin: I’m Not Alone

A man holds his head in his hands while seated at a table.Predators

“Is it even possible for something designed as entertainment to be a public service?” Predators cinematographer-editor-director David Osit asks this question of ethnographer Mark de Rond about NBC TV show To Catch a Predator and its successors, but it also applies to this project’s of-the-moment anxieties about nonfiction practice. Documentaries seem to have entered a phase of self-reflexive fretting about their own impact; I think one reason No Other Land has become so popular is because it explicitly states this, having its subjects worry about their Facebook click rates and wonder out loud whether the film they’re making can possibly realistically do anything to end the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Fellow US Documentary Competition standout The Perfect Neighbor demonstrates in part what happens when police are tasked with the duties of social workers; similarly, Predators considers what happens when journalistic television, or nonfiction filmmaking about that TV genre, is tasked with producing quantifiable results. 

Predators begins by revisiting Chris Hansen’s deplorable cult classic, along with interviews with three of the now-grown “decoys” who were cast for their unusually young appearances and used to lure in pedophiles. The opening draws upon rushes from Predator’s production as one sting is set up, augmenting the view from one camera to two or three panels of split-screen. Before any humans enter, the suburban house vibe is very Twin Peaks, something Osit leans into with an extended shot from the top of a dimly lit stairwell; the combination of that view with the imminent promise of attempted child sexual abuse is grimly evocative of Lynch’s project as travestied by Hansen’s show. The sting subject enters from outside and unknowingly hits their mark. One camera zooms in for the teen lure’s close-up as she deliberately positions himself, then the other camera frames the predator; enter, eventually, Hansen, who, cameras rolling, begins with one of his now familiar taglines: “Why don’t you take a seat?”

Predators’ first third is equal parts archival and present-day, with Osit more-or-less behind the curtains, save a shot of him and his camera framed neatly over a subject in the mirror and the odd audible off-camera question. Evading the inherent potential for nostalgic period kitsch, montages reconstruct Hansen’s startling mainstream moment of adoration as he was fawned upon in interviews by Oprah Winfrey, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart and Jay Leno; that his show was, as one journalist puts it, “a traveling circus” rather than a public good, seems like it should have been more immediately obvious than it was at the time. Predators’ second third considers Hansen’s descendants, exemplified by one Skeeter Jean, a YouTuber with a current follower count of 1.9m+ who bluntly wonders why, if every murder is profitable for someone, he can’t monetize this field himself. Jean and his skeleton crew set up shop in a motel room, wait for their mark and have the police on the way after he arrives; Osit hides in the closet and later expresses anxiety about his own complicity in exploiting with his own camera Jean’s pedophile subjects. When the YouTuber and his crew are confronted with an unforeseen situation and end up feeling bad about their actions, Jean absurdly promises to “pull some strings” to get their mark mental counseling. One takeaway here is that America’s absence of widespread public health care has had the unintended consequence of citizens deputizing themselves to punitively fill the breach, with damaging emotional consequences for both them and the targets. It’s indicative that one of Skeeter Jean’s crewmembers wears a bracelet with the words “Batman;” in Trump’s America, we’re all vigilantes (aspirational).

The film’s final third has Hansen himself seated for an interview; along the way, Osit discloses the origins of his own particular interest in the genre.  Although familiar with the years-long accusations of exploitation that have been lodged against him, the blithely unreflective Hansen has now repackaged his signature effort into an online program called Takedown, which he describes as “the culmination of 40 years of being a television journalist.” With its chillily precise framing, austere and irregularly deployed Tim Hecker score and deft continual reframing, Predators goes beyond pathos, scintillating in continually reframing its subject and equally emotional and rigorous in interrogating its own impulses. Twin Peaks has become a meaningful text for incest victims; one lesson provided by Osit’s film is that oblique artfulness can go a much longer way towards healing than a televised cartoon notion of “justice.” 

One of the more unnerving conversations I’ve had recently was with an advertising professional who wanted to convince me her field’s output was at least as legitimate, if not more so, than filmmaking proper. Many of her firm’s contracted directors are supplementing their filmmaking incomes with ad work, and without that income, she said, the filmmakers couldn’t afford to make the films I like. There are several unpleasant grains of truth to that, but then the arguments went from the utilitarian to the virtuous: being able to exercise your aesthetic within corporate constraints is actually a lot of fun and as creatively satisfying as the real thing. André is an Idiot plays like that assertion writ large; it’s exactly what I expected once I learned that this was the first feature of an extremely professional content creator, Tony Benna, who hails from stop-motion animation and has directed commercials for brands including Pepsi, Maytag and Oscar Mayer. The title sets the tone, indicating that titular cancer diagnosee André Ricciardi is, as we’re told many times, “irreverent.” He’s an “idiot” because he waited til too late in middle-age to get a colonoscopy, making an otherwise-easy-to-combat cancer potentially ineradicable; the film follows along for his last three years.

Every death is a tragedy, but the opening section of André works overtime to convince us that Ricciardi’s death specifically is robbing the world of the kind of true original we should all be so lucky to meet. He was, we’re told, a prodigy in the advertising world where he made his living. The case for his creative ferment is made by an anecdote about once wowing a Fox exec with his pitch for a Planet of the Apes ad that seemed just too out there—but the exec loved it! I don’t want to knock a man who, within the chronicle of his fatal decline, has the self-awareness to warn that in life you only have time to become accomplished at a few things, so be careful what you choose, and he’s upset that he chose advertising. Andre’s bigger problem is the way it applies the aesthetic of “artistic” commercial spots—and much “Indiewood” non-fiction—to a feature-length work about death and dying. It’s not at all a stretch for Ricciardi to announce that he sees this film as possibly a “TV commercial” raising awareness about the importance of regular colonoscopies from 40 on—a goal it would be churlish to decry, but the unblinking choice of this self-applied label still startled me. Is a PSA the only path forward for anyone who wants to accomplish any feat of meaningful mass communication for the public good? If that’s true, isn’t that immensely depressing?

With a framed Television/Patti Smith at Max Kansas City’s flyer on his wall, bookshelves full of art books about Iggy Pop and Gauguin and an unrestrained mouth around his two daughters, Ricciardi is by his own account a former hellraiser, and he seems like he was lot of fun at the bar until he had to quit drinking. But in constructing his character portrait, the film insists upon his complete singularity in exactly and repeatedly the same general terms. In doing so, it leans too far into the editorial tropes of the contemporary “second screen” concept, in which narrative beats are repeated over and over for those using the film as background content at home. Andre, however, is an A24-produced (sales title) film for theaters, not some Netflix true crime special, and the effect is to diminish death’s immensity. The film is an exemplary collection of of-the-moment high-end nonfiction tics and tropes: shot, like so much currently, with detuned lenses fuzzy around the images to haze the too-clean digital image, and second-tier Errol Morris direct-to-camera conversations from two coverage angles. When André sits and talks with his therapist or best friend, they sit in camera-friendly profiles facing each other in chairs as if doing “An Evening With” at Vulture Festival. Composer Dan Deacon’s rising C-major epiphanies provide generic uplift. Interviews go fast for humor, slower for sadness. Inevitably, Ricciardi’s body visibly breaks down, a saddening sight that leads the film to familiar epiphanies about the end of life. The film’s mechanics were so obvious than I never stopped thinking about them to start thinking about death, which here becomes an almost entirely synthetic emotional experience. In that respect, it’s entirely appropriate that Ricciardi’s final speech is delivered not by him, but by a (credit where due, clearly labeled) AI simulation.

Even more clearly designed to be virtuously unassailable, Marlee Matlin: I’m Not Alone is a super-authorized walk through the pioneering deaf actress’s life and career, directed at the performer’s behest by a fellow deaf creative, Shoshanna Stern, who spends the film’s primary interview sitting directly opposite her subject on a couch in the latter’s tony home. The film’s formal anomalies follow its subject’s lead: open captions throughout, an attention-quickening total lack of music during interviews. (If they don’t hear it, it’s not necessary; the logic is clear). But once that novelty wears off there’s not much more here than Matlin’s feelings over not being sufficiently appreciated by the industry, then or now. Matlin is obviously on firm ground about the impact that her much-substantiated claims of domestic abuse and rape against Children of a Lesser God co-star and then-boyfriend William Hurt failed to have on his career, but I’m less equipped to parse some of her other charges. When she checked into rehab at the presumably extremely expensive Betty Ford Clinic, were they really ableist monsters for making her also pay for an interpreter? The film is bookended by her appearance at the Oscar ceremonies for 2021, where she wished on the red carpet that CODA would result in an Oscar for her co-star Troy Kotsur so that she would no longer be the sole deaf Academy Award winner. Kotsur won, as did the film itself for Best Picture, but, given knowledge of Apple’s spending on the film, and Oscar politicking in general, one could wish for a more sincerely transcendent, less commercially validated conclusion.

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