The Contestant could be the yr’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 move with no contact from the skin 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 imagine 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 sport present, completely unaware that he was ultimately 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 massive, shocking twists — and given how complicit Nasubi was in his personal captivity and worldwide exploitation.

Clair Titley’s documentary begins with a quick overview of the sport present, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, and the setting that enabled it. In an period the place actuality TV was simply beginning to take off, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen specialised in luring contributors 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 instructed to pedal from India to Indonesia.

However by far, the present’s most infamous challenge was “A Life in Prizes,” a section 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 fully off no matter he might win by getting into journal sweepstakes.

Producer Toshio Tsuchiya instructed 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 digicam, which he’d use to videotape brief each day check-ins as he entered sweepstakes and slowly amassed 1 million yen value of prizes. After the challenge completed, Toshio defined, the present would edit Nasubi’s footage and launch it.

As an alternative, 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 turned 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 workers 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 digicam through the window the place he knew it was on. He performs celebratory rituals every 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 light-weight leisure like so many different reality-TV gimmick reveals.

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 take 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 selections. 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 method that means a bigger context. It’s straightforward to take it as a daunting story about what persons are keen to endure (or make different folks endure) in change for fame or revenue. And given how well-known Nasubi turned each inside and out of doors of Japan, it’s equally straightforward to take “A Life in Prizes” as a milestone occasion within the development of actuality TV, and the fascination with watching folks hurt themselves on digicam 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 straightforward to see as “A Life in Prizes” as a companion piece to the Stanford Jail Experiment, an instance of how simply energy can lure extraordinary folks into cruelty and abuse, and the way straightforward it’s to develop into obedient and accepting within the fingers of energy, and to simply accept even a ruinous established order. As Nasubi factors out in an interview with Titley, the door to his tiny condo wasn’t locked, and he might 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 reasonably than probing. There are loads 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 printed, with out Nasubi’s information. (It turned 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 could be thought-about admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the details, reasonably 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 improvement 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 at first 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 challenge, the movie morphs into one thing extra like a slick, inspirational feel-good story. It’s definitely a reduction to see Nasubi wholesome and completely happy after the early going, however there’s a relentless sense of a movie skating throughout the floor of a exceptional story, reasonably 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 targeted 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 have 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 sport present, and the massive, brilliant uplift of the ending, this film is as horrifying as any of the doomsaying docs of the previous few many years.

The Contestant is streaming on Hulu now.