The Contestant may be the scariest 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 the barriers to international cinema. The film’s memorable, irresistible hook: After a drunken binge, Korean businessman Oh Dae-su wakes up in a small, dilapidated hotel room, where he has been imprisoned by unknown parties. As months pass with no outside contact other than anonymous food deliveries, he begins to unravel, numbed by isolation and helplessness.

Watch Hulu’s enchanting documentary The participantit’s hard to believe Park and Old boy manga writer Garon Tsuchiya did not draw any inspiration from the subject, Nasubi. Starting in 1998, Nasubi spent more than a year naked, starving and cut off from the world in an equally tiny suite as part of a Japanese game show, completely unaware that he was ultimately being watched by 17 million gawking fans. His real-world story was considerably less gory than that Old boybut it’s even more astonishing given its big, surprising twists – 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 Shonenand the environment that made this possible. In an era where reality TV existed just starting to take off, Susunu! Denpa Shonen specializes in enticing contestants to perform elaborate, dangerous stunts in the hopes of furthering their entertainment careers. A quick montage of footage from the show flashes over some of the show’s other most infamous moments, including an intercontinental hitchhiking ride that left one participant hospitalized, and a stunt where two comedians were given a swan-shaped paddle boat and told that they had to kick from India. to Indonesia.

But by far the show’s most infamous project was “A Life in Prizes,” a segment in which a would-be comedian was placed naked in a room, with nothing but a rack of magazines and a stack of postcards, and told to live completely off whatever he could win by entering magazine sweepstakes.

Producer Toshio Tsuchiya told it Denpa Shonen participant Nasubi (born Hamatsu Tomoaki – the unusual shape of his face inspired his stage name ‘Eggplant’) that he would live in a room with a camera on a tripod, which he would use to video record short daily check-ins as he entered lotteries and slowly collected prizes worth 1 million yen. After the project ended, Toshio explained, the show would edit and release Nasubi’s footage.

Instead, Toshio left secret cameras in Nasubi’s room running 24 hours a day. Initially, the show’s producers edited the footage into short segments for the show. But as millions of fans became obsessed with Nasubi, detractors denounced him as an actor who staged the entire stunt. So Toshio began live streaming the cameras from Nasubi’s room, employing 24-hour staff to monitor the footage and manually control the mobile video effect that obscured Nasubi’s genitals with a CG eggplant.

The images from which Titley collects Denpa Shonen feels remarkably like a manically narrated version of Bo Burnham: Inside, with Nasubi’s naked dancing replacing the musical interludes. Hoping for a TV comedy career once the show actually aired, Nasubi played to his camera during the window he knew was happening. He performs celebratory rituals when he wins a prize, making silly faces and trying on silly voices, and generally clowning around for an imaginary audience. The crazy antics and ridiculous extremes of the whole experiment tend to make The participant feels comical and weightless, a light entertainment like so many other reality TV gimmick shows.

The hidden cameras tell a different story. As the months pass, Nasubi tries to survive without any source of nutrition except scarce, arbitrary prizes such as fruit drinks and dog food. He is getting thinner and bonier. He suffers from bouts of fatigue, depression, confusion and what appears to be mania. And Toshio just keeps going.

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 is calm and philosophical about his ordeal, explaining why he didn’t just walk away from the experiment when he started to deteriorate, and looking clear-eyed at what it was doing to him mentally. Toshio, meanwhile, remains politely apologetic about how sadistically he pushed Nasubi to continue with the show, but offers little explanation or insight into his behind-the-scenes decisions. The film will likely leave viewers with more questions about the story than they came in with.

Part of that comes from Titley’s refusal to editorialize or shape the story in a way that suggests a larger context. It’s easy to read it as a scary story about what people are willing to endure (or make other people endure) in exchange for fame or profit. And given how famous Nasubi became both inside and outside Japan, it’s just as easy to see “A Life in Prizes” as a milestone in the growth of reality TV, and the fascination with watching people put themselves in front of the camera causing harm to entertain others. (Fool aired the year after ‘A Life in Prizes’ ended. So did Survivor. Fear factor came the following year.)

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

Image: Hulu/Everett Collection

The participant doesn’t advance any of these larger ideas, and Titley’s handling of her subjects seems gentle and cautious rather than probing. There are many disturbing revelations within The participant, including that Toshio encouraged Nasubi to keep a diary of his daily life – which was then taken away and published, without Nasubi’s knowledge. (It became a national bestseller in four parts.) But the film doesn’t explore how that happened, nor does it question the ethics behind it: it only mentions the publication of Nasubi’s diary as a data point in establishing the extent of his fame in Japan. .

It can be considered admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the facts, rather than trying to extract a moral from the whole situation. But the story feels more like a quirky, isolated human interest story than a turning point in the development of exploitative, stunt-driven reality television. It plays like a feature film version of the “Here’s a crazy story from Japan…” news reports that Titley excerpts at the beginning of the film, more of a curiosity than a bigger discussion starter. And when Nasubi takes up his post…Denpa Shonen life and embarks on a radical personal project, the film turns into something more like a slick, inspiring feel-good story. It’s certainly a relief to see Nasubi healthy and happy after the early departure, but there’s a constant sense of a film skating across the surface of a remarkable story, rather than exploring its depths.

None of these make The participant a less attractive watch. It seems we’ve passed the peak of grim, cautionary documentaries focusing on the seemingly endless environmental, technological and societal apocalypses looming in the near future, perhaps because they had piled up in such a numbing abundance that audiences turned away. Despite the guilty voyeuristic appeal of a naked man not knowing he’s being filmed, the “Wow, this guy is so crazy!” framing of Toshio’s game show and the big, bright revival of the ending, this film is as frightening as any doomsday dramas of the past few decades.

The participant is now streaming on Hulu.