It’s extremely frustrating to watch a film with an intriguing premise that doesn’t deliver in the slightest. The sense of disappointment feels like a wound; wasted potential for excellence is much worse than straightforward mediocrity. Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero is the most egregious example of a cinematic fumbling-of-the-ball I’ve seen in quite some time. The concept is about a health guru, Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska), who is recruited by bourgeois parents to teach their children a new healthy eating course at an elite British boarding school. However, this woman is a nut, a quack, who begins by teaching her pupils about “Conscious Eating”, or slowly eating tiny little bites of your food. She then moves them onto a “plant based mono diet,” which is exactly what it sounds like – they still eat super slow, small portions, with tiny bites, but now regulated to only one type of vegetable per meal. Her students comply with gusto, described by their principal as competitive and sensitive.
Among Miss Novak’s students include Ben (Samuel D Anderson), a scholarship kid who is taking the course to raise his PE grades, and is more resistant to “conscious eating” than the other students. There is also Ragna (Florence Baker), an angsty girl who likes to scream at her parents about how they don’t understand her, her friend Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt) who struggles with bulimia, and Fred (Luke Barker), Ben’s roommate, a lonely male ballerina abandoned by his rich parents as they work abroad.
Once Miss Novak has her students completely under her thumb, she keeps breaching the professional student-teacher boundaries with them, getting far too close, taking a special interest in Fred, and threatening Ben’s scholarship status until he complies and indoctrinates himself into what is essentially her eating disorder cult. She begins to actively teach her students that they should eat less, and that they don’t need to eat as much as they think, they’ve been taught lies from the agriculture industry capitalists. She confidently spews pseudoscience while they listen with rapture, internalizing and getting deeper and deeper into her nonsense, without an independent thought or care for their health, convinced they’re getting stronger and healthier. They seem to revel in the conflict it causes with their parents.
The problem with Club Zero is that it’s supposed to be a dark comedy and completely fails in execution. It’s more grating than funny. Nothing about the film was landing with the audience. People were turned off, and the theater began emptying out long before the credits finished rolling. Part of the issue is that the film struggles with too many ideas and themes at once. The satire against the selfish, withdrawn wealthy parents comes through, but the entire eating disorder aspect of the film is mishandled and comes across in poor taste. It feels like a gimmick for the plot, punching down, instead of any actual commentary on the dangerous disorder which affects over 70 million people globally. One of the only funny moments of the entire film is when Elsa asks Ragna in a snarky voice “are you really going to eat all that?” as the camera reveals her lonely plate with only 3 small potato wedges, that she quickly devours and then immediately goes to the bathroom to purge. There’s so much that goes into the psychology of eating disorders, of control, power, body image, and self punishment, but all of that is erased because the students’ mentalities aren’t those of an actual eating disorder, but of being brainwashed into a cult, a completely different frame of mind, where they are convinced that they are doing the right thing, growing healthier and stronger through not eating. It’s a bit bananas and hard to suspend your disbelief that these teenage students could be such imbeciles, but I suppose all the adults in the film are just as moronic, encouraging them to continue with their “conscious eating” until it is too late. It felt like the filmmakers were looking down on its young characters, saying look at how stupid, self-righteous, and naive Gen Z is, depicting them with an extremely shallow understanding of economics and science, missing the mark entirely – it just doesn’t make sense that the characters would be so stupid if they’re also described as top students at an elite school – you don’t end up a top student without a brain in your head that is resistant to vague misinformation that Miss Novak loves to preach.
The film was a bore to sit through, from beginning to end. It’s extremely repetitive, with the same scenes of the kids cutting up food on their plates and not eating, repeating again and again, with the same music each time. Somehow, the film managed to find the worst covers of each song it used, including Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and a beloved Christmas tune. I don’t think I could go more than a few minutes watching this movie before something bothered me so much I had to grimace. With a terrible script and ineffective direction, the film doesn’t mesh together at all. It doesn’t feel enjoyable, engaging, satisfying, or emotional to any degree. And this could have been excusable if any of this film was as funny as it perhaps hoped to be, but sadly it fell extremely flat.