The Contestant might be the year’s most twisted documentary

Twenty years in the past, Park Chan-wook’s revenge thriller Oldboy turned him right into a worldwide star, setting off a brand new wave of Korean neo-noirs and serving to break down limitations for worldwide cinema. The film’s memorable, irresistible hook: After a drunken bender, Korean businessman Oh Dae-su wakes up in a small, dilapidated resort room, the place he’s been imprisoned by unknown events. As months go with no contact from the surface aside from nameless meals deliveries, he begins to unravel, numbed by isolation and helplessness.

Watching Hulu’s mesmerizing documentary The Contestant, it’s exhausting to consider Park and Oldboy manga author Garon Tsuchiya didn’t take some inspiration from its topic, Nasubi. Beginning in 1998, Nasubi spent greater than a yr bare, ravenous, and reduce off from the world in a equally small suite as a part of a Japanese recreation present, completely unaware that he was finally being watched by 17 million gawking followers. His real-world story was significantly much less gory than Oldboy, but it surely’s much more startling, given its huge, shocking twists — and given how complicit Nasubi was in his personal captivity and worldwide exploitation.

Clair Titley’s documentary begins with a short overview of the sport present, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, and the surroundings that enabled it. In an period the place actuality TV was simply beginning to take off, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen specialised in luring individuals into performing elaborate, harmful stunts within the hopes of furthering their leisure careers. A fast montage of footage from the present blitzes throughout just a few of the present’s different most infamous moments, together with an intercontinental hitchhiking journey that hospitalized one participant, and a stunt the place two comedians got a swan-shaped pedal boat and informed to pedal from India to Indonesia.

However by far, the present’s most infamous undertaking was “A Life in Prizes,” a phase the place a would-be comic was positioned in a room, bare, with nothing however a rack of magazines and a pile of postcards, and ordered to dwell totally off no matter he may win by coming into journal sweepstakes.

Producer Toshio Tsuchiya informed Denpa Shōnen contestant Nasubi (born Hamatsu Tomoaki — the weird form of his face impressed his stage title, “Eggplant”) that he’d dwell in a room with one tripod-mounted digital camera, which he’d use to videotape brief day by day check-ins as he entered sweepstakes and slowly amassed 1 million yen price of prizes. After the undertaking completed, Toshio defined, the present would edit Nasubi’s footage and launch it.

As a substitute, Toshio stored secret cameras in Nasubi’s room operating 24 hours a day. Initially, the present’s producers edited the footage down into brief segments for the present. As soon as hundreds of thousands of followers grew to become obsessive about Nasubi, although, detractors denounced him as an actor faking the complete stunt. So Toshio started to livestream the cameras from Nasubi’s room, using an around-the-clock employees to watch the feed and hand-operate the cellular video impact that obscured Nasubi’s genitals with a CG eggplant.

The footage Titley assembles from Denpa Shōnen feels remarkably like a manically narrated model of Bo Burnham: Inside, with Nasubi’s bare dancing changing the musical interludes. Hoping for a TV comedy profession as soon as the present really aired, Nasubi performed to his digital camera in the course of the window the place he knew it was on. He performs celebratory rituals each time he wins a prize, pulls foolish faces and tries out foolish voices, and usually clowns for an imaginary viewers. The goofy antics and the ridiculous extremes of the entire experiment edge towards making The Contestant really feel comedian and weightless, a lightweight leisure like so many different reality-TV gimmick exhibits.

Picture: Hulu/Everett Assortment

The hidden cameras inform one other story. As months stretch by, Nasubi tries to outlive with no supply of vitamin however sparse, random prizes like fruit drinks and pet food. He grows more and more gaunt and bony. He suffers bouts of lassitude, despair, confusion, and what looks as if mania. And Toshio simply retains rolling.

Twenty-five years after the extremely discomfiting finish of the “Life in Prizes” experiment, Titley introduced Nasubi and Toshio in for studio interviews to debate their reminiscences of this worldwide train in voyeurism. Nasubi is calm and philosophical about his ordeal, explaining why he didn’t simply stroll away from the experiment when he started deteriorating, and taking a clear-eyed have a look at what it did to him mentally. Toshio, in the meantime, stays politely apologetic about how sadistically he pushed Nasubi to proceed on the present, however affords few explanations or insights into his behind the scenes choices. The film is more likely to go away viewers with extra questions concerning the story than they went in with.

A part of that comes from Titley’s refusal to editorialize, or to form the story in a approach that implies a bigger context. It’s simple to take it as a daunting story about what persons are prepared to endure (or make different individuals endure) in trade for fame or revenue. And given how well-known Nasubi grew to become each inside and out of doors of Japan, it’s equally simple to take “A Life in Prizes” as a milestone occasion within the progress of actuality TV, and the fascination with watching individuals hurt themselves on digital camera to entertain others. (Jackass began airing the yr after “A Life in Prizes” ended. So did Survivor. Worry Issue got here the yr after that.)

Nevertheless it’s simply as simple to see as “A Life in Prizes” as a companion piece to the Stanford Jail Experiment, an instance of how simply energy can lure odd individuals into cruelty and abuse, and the way simple it’s to change into obedient and accepting within the palms of energy, and to just accept even a ruinous establishment. As Nasubi factors out in an interview with Titley, the door to his tiny condo wasn’t locked, and he may have left at any time. Previous a sure level, he says, he didn’t have the desire to withstand.

Picture: Hulu/Everett Assortment

The Contestant doesn’t draw out any of those bigger concepts, and Titley’s dealing with of her topics appears light and cautious moderately than probing. There are plenty of unsettling revelations in The Contestant, together with that Toshio inspired Nasubi to maintain a journal about his day-to-day life — which was then taken away and revealed, with out Nasubi’s data. (It grew to become a four-volume nationwide bestseller.) However the movie doesn’t discover how that occurred, or query the ethics behind it: It simply notes the publication of Nasubi’s diary as a knowledge level in establishing the scope of his fame in Japan.

It is likely to be thought-about admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the info, moderately than attempting to attract out an ethical from the complete state of affairs. Nevertheless it leaves the story feeling extra like a unusual, remoted human-interest story than a watershed second within the growth of exploitative, stunt-driven actuality tv. It performs like a feature-length model of the “Right here’s a wacky story from Japan…” information gadgets that Titley excerpts initially of the movie, extra a curiosity than an even bigger discussion-starter. And when Nasubi enters his post-Denpa Shōnen life and embarks on a radical private undertaking, the movie morphs into one thing extra like a slick, inspirational feel-good story. It’s actually a aid to see Nasubi wholesome and glad after the early going, however there’s a continuing sense of a movie skating throughout the floor of a outstanding story, moderately than exploring its depths.

None of which makes The Contestant any much less of a compelling watch. We appear to have moved previous the height of grim cautionary documentaries centered on the seemingly countless environmental, technological, and societal apocalypses looming within the close to future, perhaps as a result of they’d piled up in such numbing profusion that audiences had been turning away. Despite the responsible voyeuristic lure of a unadorned man who doesn’t know he’s being filmed, the “Wow, this man’s so wacky!” framing of Toshio’s recreation present, and the massive, brilliant uplift of the ending, this film is as scary as any of the doomsaying docs of the previous couple of a long time.

The Contestant is streaming on Hulu now.