Nasubi winning a package in The Contestant
The Big Picture Can you draw a straight line between a Japanese reality show from 1998 in which a naked man attempts to live solely off of magazine sweepstakes prizes and your young nephew watching a Mr. Beast YouTube video where the ultra-popular creator spends a week buried alive? The Contestant makes a strong case for it. It's s a compelling documentary in the way that true crime podcasts or car crashes are. You know you’re witnessing something awful, but you simply can’t look away.
To make matters even more complicated, Nasubi isn’t aware the endeavor is being televised. While he knows he’s being filmed, powerful producer Tsuchiya has lied and told him that most of the footage will not be aired — something he is grateful for, considering he promised his family he wouldn’t go nude. Thus begins Nasubi’s year of isolation, starvation, and depression while — unbeknownst to him — the world tunes in weekly to laugh.
Nasubi claims that Tsuchiya went from a god to a devil in his mind throughout the process, though Tsuchiya views himself more as a mad scientist. He has a producer’s brain, with some of his manipulation techniques familiar to anyone who used to watch Quinn and Rachel do it on UnREAL, but there’s a sociological curiosity to him, too. He doesn’t just want to make good TV — he wants to see what humanity will do when pushed to extremes like in the Milgram or Stanford Prison Experiments.
Titley paces the documentary well, as “Life in Prizes” ends at almost exactly the halfway mark, leaving us wondering where we go from here — something Nasubi was in the dark about as well. The reveal that the journey is far from over feels like a punch to the gut, and there’s a sick feeling you get once Nasubi finds himself in a hellish Groundhog Day of sorts just days after finding victory.
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