Review: ‘Club Zero’ Isn’t as ‘Disturbing to Some Viewers’ as It Should Be – The Village Voice

Director Jessica Hausner’s new film, Club Zero, is one of those self-conscious micro-movies that appears simple out of the gate — slyly satiric concept, low-key execution — and then seems to lose track of what it is. By the end, you’re almost certain Hausner and co-writer Géraldine Bajard were pretty confused themselves. The American distributor, Film Movement, offers an additional distraction upfront, with a disclaimer about the film’s depiction of “behavior control” and eating disorders, which might be “disturbing to some viewers.”

Club Zero hardly gets that confrontational, alas. We’re in the wealthy British suburbs, at an expensive private school that has just hired a new, young nutrition teacher (Mia Wasikowska), knowing initially that she’s a dietary evangelical for what she calls “conscious eating.” All of her sulky students are rail-thin to begin with, but her group-therapy-like sessions preach a familiar anti-corporate, vegan-adjacent rejection of processed foods and overeating in general — until they approach full-on food abstinence. Hausner’s visual style goes for a half-frozen, early-Yorgos-Lanthimos-y alienation-ism — restrained perfs in long shots, often dosed with slow zooms — which made me think that the film might make a spicy double bill with Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet, conjuring a smirky, veddy-Brit (yet multi-accented) call-and-response between deranged starvation and wild slobberiness. (Stricklandness inserts itself as well with The Duke of Burgundy star Sidse Babett Knudsen, as the school’s clueless head administrator.)

As it is, Hausner’s movie feels like a half-measure — the potential for either satiric or dramatic payoff, or both, is largely squandered, and the emotional temperature remains cool. You hope it’ll progress from tepid to crazy, in vain. None of the characters (a half dozen po-faced teens and their irritated parents, who include Mathieu Demy and Keeley Forsyth) have even a second dimension to them, beyond their embrace of, or their reactions to, the idea of eating nothing. Wasikowska offers no fire, even as her placid instructor, who dresses like a ’50s bobbysoxer and peddles her own brand of “fasting tea,” begins suggesting, cultishly, that transcendence lies ahead and that the kids will be “survivors” when the ways of modern food consumption destroy mankind.

 As a parody of modern, and also not-so-new, dieting cult-think, the film offers nothing clever or original, and besides, it’s never funny. You can’t help but wonder, is bulimia/anorexia not a real enough illness for Hausner, that she can use it as a metaphor to club lefty academic trends and Gen Z progressivism? Or is this puzzling, low-budget trifle, which somehow required 27 production entities from more than eight countries to fund it, actually not saying anything at all?  ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting the Village Voice and our advertisers.