The craziest reality stunt ever pulled is laid bare, showing humanity’s desperate need for connection.

In 1998, Japan was at the forefront of the new reality television boom. Driven to desperation by a spiralling economic downturn, the Japanese public demanded distracting and enthralling entertainment from which emerged the reality TV show, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, spearheaded by the obsessive Japanese TV producer, Toshio Tsuchiya.

Clair Titley’s documentary follows Tomoaki Hamatsu (or Nasubi, as he’s better known) from childhood to the present day, focusing on his time as a contestant for the show.

Nasubi means “Eggplant”, a childhood nickname that originally mocked his unusually long face. Nasubi’s humour and attitude eventually allowed him to reclaim his name and earn him friends in his home of Fukushima prefecture. Picked out of a ballot of random people desperate for fame, he was led blindfolded to an apartment, forced to strip and left. He was not aware that he was being broadcast to Japan, his rapidly developing cult following, his parents and family back home.

In The Contestant, we witness the cruelty Nasubi was subjected to and his struggles after Denpa Shōnen.

Poignant themes of isolation, responsibility and morality echo throughout the film as we watch the small apartment room where Nasubi lived for 15 months, surviving off whatever fate provided him through magazine sweepstakes.

Nasubi’s story could very easily have been relayed as a banal “Reality TV is bad” documentary that demonised those involved, exoticising Nasubi’s suffering for the audience to lap up. But instead, director Titley acknowledges that to do so would make her no better than the obsessive producers who manipulated Nasubi in the first place.

She approaches every moment of Nasubi’s story with compassion and a desire to understand that is extended to everyone.

New interview footage from Nasubi, Tsuchiya and others is coupled with archival Denpa Shōnen footage, with voiceovers translated into English and narrated by American actor and comedian, Fred Armisen. Titley’s style is comprehensive, and her drive for comprehension is infectious.

Even Tsuchiya is given the opportunity to share his justifications for the events that transpired, espousing his ethos that all humans are entertaining.

Whether or not that sentiment accounts for 15 months of psychological abuse and humiliation is certainly debatable, but Titley displays a keen interest in Tsuchiya’s story. Perhaps she wants to avoid the obsessively compulsive pitfall he seemed to fall into.

Frankly, there’s enough in Nasubi’s public humiliation to fill a documentary trilogy.

His story is certainly interesting enough and no-one would have blamed Titley for ending the film with him being lead offstage (covered only in a blanket and cheered on by a devoted mob of fans) or abandoning Nasubi’s story with his fading from the public eye. Instead, she sticks with the portrayal of Nasubi as a human being who must deal with the ramifications of what has been done to him.

Titley’s desire to uncover Nasubi’s emotional trauma and its reverberations in his life, post-Denpa Shōnen, is admirable and accomplished.

In previous interviews the director has talked about the importance of Nasubi’s consent in making this film, and the regaining of his agency is a clear throughline that she weaves throughout The Contestant.

The film’s final act offers resolution, as Nasubi attempts to reclaim a human connection that was denied to him for so long.

Nasubi uses his time post-experiment to rediscover a world of human connection that was either lost or denied to him on the show. He pushes himself in new and unexpected ways, and we, the audience, who have watched him at the very bottom, celebrate his ascent to unseen heights.

The Contestant screens on Friday  1 November at 6.15 pm at the Capri Theatre, Goodwood.

This review was provided by the “2024 Emerging Screen Critics Program” – a Screen Studies collaboration between the Adelaide Film Festival and UniSA Creative, with the participation of students and mentors from the University of South Australia, the University of Adelaide and Flinders University. Supported by CityMag.