“The Contestant” may be the most twisted documentary of the year

Twenty years ago, Park Chan-wook’s revenge thriller old boy made him a global star, sparked a new wave of Korean neo-noirs and helped break down barriers to international cinema. The film’s memorable, irresistible hook: After a drunken binge, Korean businessman Oh Dae-su wakes up in a small, run-down hotel room where he has been locked up by strangers. As months pass, with no outside contact other than anonymous food deliveries, he begins to unravel, numbed by isolation and helplessness.

Watch Hulu’s fascinating documentary The candidateit’s hard to believe park and old boy Manga author Garon Tsuchiya was not inspired by his theme, Nasubi. Starting in 1998, Nasubi spent more than a year naked, starving and cut off from the world in a similarly small suite as part of a Japanese game show, unaware that he was ultimately being watched by 17 million gawking fans. His real story was significantly less bloody than old boybut it’s even more startling given its big, twists and turns – and given Nasubi’s complicity in his own captivity and global exploitation.

Clair Titley’s documentary begins with a brief overview of the game show. Susunu! Denpa Shōnenand the environment that made it possible. In a time when reality TV existed is just starting to take off, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen Specializes in tricking contestants into performing elaborate, dangerous stunts in hopes of advancing their entertainment careers. A brief montage of footage from the show flashes through some of the show’s other most infamous moments, including an intercontinental hitchhike that left one contestant hospitalized and a stunt in which two comedians from India were given a swan-shaped pedal boat and asked to to pedal to Indonesia.

But by far the series’ most infamous project was “A Life in Prizes,” a segment in which a would-be comedian was placed in a room naked, with nothing but a magazine rack and a stack of postcards, and sentenced to live completely apart from anything he was able to win by taking part in magazine competitions.

Producer Toshio Tsuchiya narrated Denpa Shōnen Contestant Nasubi (née Hamatsu Tomoaki – the unusual shape of his face inspired his stage name “Eggplant”) stated that he would live in a room with a camera mounted on a tripod, which he used to video record short daily check-ins He participated in competitions and gradually collected 1 million yen worth of prizes. Once the project is complete, Toshio explained, the show will edit and release Nasubi’s footage.

Instead, Toshio had secret cameras running in Nasubi’s room 24 hours a day. First, the show’s producers broke the footage into short segments for the show. However, as millions of fans became obsessed with Nasubi, critics denounced him as an actor who faked the entire stunt. So Toshio began broadcasting the cameras live from Nasubi’s room, employing staff around the clock to monitor the feed and manually operate the mobile video effect that obscured Nasubi’s genitals with a CG eggplant.

The footage from which Titley is compiled Denpa Shōnen feels remarkably like a manically narrated version of Bo Burnham: Inside, with Nasubi’s naked dance replacing the musical interludes. Nasubi hoped to pursue a career as a TV comedian once the show actually aired, and acted in front of his camera during the window when he knew it was on. He performs celebratory rituals when he wins a prize, makes silly faces and tries out silly voices, and generally clowns for an imaginary audience. The silly antics and ridiculous extremes of the entire experiment bleed into action The candidate Feel weird and weightless, a light entertainment like so many other reality TV gimmick shows.

Image: Hulu/Everett Collection

The hidden cameras tell a different story. As the months pass, Nasubi tries to survive without a source of food but with meager, random prizes like fruit drinks and dog food. He is becoming increasingly gaunt and bony. He suffers from bouts of fatigue, depression, confusion and apparent mania. And Toshio just keeps rolling.

Twenty-five years after the incredibly disturbing end of the Life in Prizes experiment, Titley invited Nasubi and Toshio for studio interviews to discuss their memories of this international exercise in voyeurism. Nasubi looks at his ordeal calmly and philosophically, explaining why he didn’t just leave the experiment when he started to get worse, and taking a clear look at what it was doing to him mentally. Toshio, meanwhile, continues to politely apologize for how sadistically he pushed Nasubi to continue in the series, but offers little explanation or insight into his behind-the-scenes decisions. The film is likely to leave viewers with more questions about the story than they actually thought of.

Part of this is because Titley refuses to edit the story or frame it in a way that suggests a larger context. It’s easy to interpret it as a frightening story about what people are willing to endure (or make others endure) in exchange for fame or profit. And given how famous Nasubi became both inside and outside of Japan, it’s just as easy to see “A Life in Prizes” as a milestone in the evolution of reality television and the fascination with watching people get on camera hurting yourself to entertain others. (Donkey It began airing a year after “A Life in Prizes” ended. It did that too Survivors. Fear factor came the year after.)

But it’s just as good as a companion piece to A Life in Prizes Stanford prison experiment, an example of how easily power can lead ordinary people to cruelty and abuse, and how easy it is to become obedient and tolerant of the hands of power, even accepting a ruinous status quo. As Nasubi points out in an interview with Titley, the door to his tiny apartment was unlocked and he could have left at any time. At a certain point, he says, he no longer had the will to resist.

Image: Hulu/Everett Collection

The candidate doesn’t bring any of these larger ideas to the fore, and Titley’s approach to her subjects comes across as gentle and cautious rather than probing. There are many disturbing revelations The candidate, including the fact that Toshio encouraged Nasubi to keep a diary about his daily life – which was then taken away and published without Nasubi’s knowledge. (It became a four-volume national bestseller.) But the film does not examine how this happened, nor does it question the ethics behind it: it merely mentions the publication of Nasubi’s diary as a data point for determining the extent of his fame in Japan.

It could be seen as admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the facts rather than trying to draw a moral from the entire situation. But that makes the story feel more like a quirky, isolated human interest story than a turning point in the evolution of exploitative, stunt-driven reality television. It plays like a feature-length version of the “Here’s a crazy story from Japan…” news story that Titley teases at the beginning of the film, which is more of a curiosity than a major discussion starter. And when Nasubi takes his post-Denpa Shōnen lives and begins a radical personal project, the film turns into more of a sophisticated, inspiring feel-good story. It’s definitely a relief to see Nasubi healthy and happy after the untimely end, but there’s always the feeling that the film skims over the surface of a remarkable story rather than exploring its depths.

None of this matters The candidate no less convincing watch. We seem to have moved past the peak of grim cautionary documentaries that focus on the seemingly endless ecological, technological and societal apocalypses looming in the near future, perhaps because they had accumulated in such a numbing abundance that viewers turned away. Despite the guilty voyeuristic allure of a naked guy who doesn’t know he’s being filmed, the “Wow, this guy is so crazy!” persists. With its framing of Toshio’s game show and the big, bright exhilaration of the ending, this film is as frightening as any of the ominous documentaries of the last few decades.

The candidate is now streaming on Hulu.