Club Zero: Film Review
Given the premise, I wasn’t sure if Club Zero was going to be for me, but I had to check it out for the sake of Mia Wasikowska. While I understood what director/co-writer Jessica Hausner was trying to say, the execution didn’t work for me.
This dark comedy stars Wasikowska as Miss Novak, who is hired by an international boarding school, The Talent Campus, to teach pupils about “conscious eating”. After instructing them about mindful consumption, Novak slowly manipulates her students into eating less and less, brainwashing them into thinking they don’t need food to survive. Five students – Fred (Luke Barker), Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt), Ragna (Florence Baker), Ben (Samuel D. Anderson) and Helen (Gwen Currant) – fall completely under her cult leader-like spell and aspire to join her in the ominous Club Zero, despite concerns from the school and their parents.
I appreciated some of Hausner’s ideas and her satirical exploration of cult mentality, the power of the collective, fad diets and putting your faith in an authority figure instead of proven science. But I found the film dull, cold and hollow and the vibe felt totally off. It’s billed as a dark comedy (and it’s certainly very dark!) but it’s perhaps only slightly amusing at times. Also, the storyline gradually becomes quite repetitive, the ending is deeply unsatisfying and the sparse score is rather grating.
I couldn’t understand why these teenagers had so much belief in Novak, even when they were clearly making themselves sick through starvation. She is very unassuming and not what you’d expect from a cult leader-type figure. I would have liked more information about Novak and this titular club (there is no backstory at all) but she remains this mysterious oddball who is clearly not right physically or mentally. Wasikowska did well as this unnervingly pleasant manipulator, but some of the acting from the teenage newcomers needed work.
This opens with a trigger warning and I know showing something is not the same as endorsing something, but promoting anorexia (albeit in a satirical context) feels wrong. The ideas are interesting and there is a disturbing scene I won’t forget in a hurry, but overall, this didn’t work for me.
In cinemas from Friday 6th December