The Contestant

The Contestant is a standard-grade documentary buoyed mightily by its subject—no harm in that.

"The Contestant" casts "Susunu! Denpa Shōnen" as a veritable Big Bang for our current shock-value pop culture, and not flatteringly.

It’s the story of Nasubi’s post-TV life that elevates “The Contestant” from a chronicle of exploitation to a tale of resilience and reinvention.

The Contestant is an utterly transfixing retelling of events, one that evokes all manner of questions about the fundamental cruelty of reality television as entertainment. But evoke is all it does.

Narrow focus never allows “The Contestant” to grow beyond the story it’s telling, but it suits a film about a program that felt more like a Stanley Milgram experiment than it did a TV show.

Titely’s feature debut does an admirable job condensing the show into a powerful hour-and-change saga.

It raises a lot of ethical questions, for sure, though many viewers will find themselves watching in what is surely a similarly voyeuristic way the second time around as the documentary airs the most outrageous original footage.

The Contestant is a harrowing and humanizing exploration of a bizarre Japanese TV program. It'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.

A riveting documentary about probably the cruelest reality show ever produced

We spend two of the film’s acts looking at the ugliness of people through Tsuchiya’s literal Denpa Shōnen lens. But this last act of the film is a touching turn about the healing that community can bring to an individual, and vice versa.