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The thing about The Contestant is that, while we might object to the cruelty inflicted on Nasumi, we're still riveted and we still watch. As much as we deny it, there probably is some sadistic schadenfreude in all of us.

The contestant himself is naïve and perhaps a bit of a simpleton which makes us even more upset about what's being done to him. The last 30 minutes of this movie however show a totally other side of him as a truly loving human being, in sharp contrast to the producers who caged and tortured him. Whether this love and caring for others is or is not a result of what he is endured is irrelevant. With this reveal the film shifts from being painful to being uplifting.

Full disclosure: I am a hospital based physician, albeit in Canada, so that might bias my review. Now that that is out-of-the-way, I have to say that I have rarely seen such a combination of bad over-the-top melodrama and absolute medical nonsense. I had to leave 3/4 of the way into the first episode and that was only because I forced myself to watch that much. I was ready to quit after the opening operating room scenes that were so disconnected from reality that I felt insulted.

I am quite ready to tolerate some medical nonsense if it helps move the plot forward but I resent when the producer and director treat their audience like ignorant idiots. Nobody in the real world behaves like these people, certainly nobody in the real world practices medicine like this. In my mind I could hear the director telling the patient to look woebegone and the doctors to strike heroic poses with deeply emotional expressions while spouting dialogue that would never be heard in a medical practice.

I would avoid this if you have any self-respect.