A nutrition teacher exerts a cult-like hold over her students in Club Zero, which played this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival after premiering in competition at Cannes. Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner‘s divisive film provoked walkouts at the French film fest over a disturbing scene of vomit-eating, but that only represents a brief moment in this otherwise thoughtful parable for the effect teachers can have on their young students’ ideology.
While the underlying message is profound, however, Club Zero is never really convincing on a surface level, and its efforts to work as satire are often muddled. Still, this one is too strikingly directed and meticulously crafted to easily dismiss, and almost manages to hold as fascinating a grip over its audience as the teacher holds over her students.
Club Zero stars Mia Wasikowska as Ms. Novak, a nutrition instructor at an exclusive boarding school who instructs her students on what initially seems to be pretty sound advice: conscious eating, which involves being aware of your body’s hunger levels and nutrition needs, and consuming mindfully. Or, in the world of the film, loading up your plate with a tiny fraction of food, cutting it into the smallest of pieces, and examining each morsel on your fork like a work of fine art.
While students like Fred (Luke Barker), Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt), and Helen (Gwen Currant) dig into Ms. Novak’s extreme food practices, Ragna (Florence Baker) sneaks meat sticks from a vending machine and Ben (Samuel D Anderson) continues to thoughtlessly shovel food into his mouth, threatening a potential scholarship.
Had Club Zero targeted a more extreme form of dietary restriction, any number of fad diet trends, it might have been a sharper and more effective satire. But conscious eating, even in the extreme form presented within the movie, is so easily digestible as a positive form of nutrition that we struggle to see the real-world downside.
Club Zero, meanwhile presents conscious eating as a kind of gateway diet to the most extreme practices, and shockingly soon, the students are not eating at all. While a pair of students drop out of her class, the others buy into Ms. Novak’s form of breatharianism without any resistance at all.
And while Ms. Novak gets into some hot water with the parent’s board and superintendent Ms. Dorset (Sidse Babett Knudsen), it’s not because of her nutrition instruction but inappropriate conduct with one of her students. Even after she has been dismissed, her class wastes away into skeletal frames as part of the titular Club Zero of non-eaters, their parents unable to reason with them.
Club Zero is one-note in its narrative but dazzlingly presented by director Hausner, with stark Kubrickian set design, stilted performances, and a persuasive use of camera zooms that slowly draw you in and pull you out of every scene at the director’s will.
But the hyper-stylized world also infects Club Zero‘s characters, and for much of the movie we seem to be watching aliens who never respond to what is happening around them in a sensible way; only Ben’s mother (Amanda Lawrence) reacts with any level of reason to what she clearly recognizes as nonsense.
Derailed by an unnecessarily ambiguous ending, Club Zero may be unsatisfying but it’s so thoroughly fascinating that it holds an unusual grip over its audience. Hausner’s presentation and Wasikowska’s fiercely compassionate performance as the cult-like nutritionist help sell the appeal these kinds of figures hold over their followers, and lend the film a memorably haunting quality.
