‘Club Zero’ Review: Modern Concepts of Faith and Consumption Are Contended With in Jessica Hausner’s Half-Baked Latest Effort
Courtesy of Film Movement.
We have heard of Keto, Paleo, and Veganism, but the diet fad in Club Zero is known as “conscious eating,” aka autophagy, aka eating nothing at all. The latest work from Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner, Club Zero is a no-frills black comedy with lofty ideas that are never fully brought to life on screen, making for an ultimately frustrating rumination on concepts of faith and consumption and how they will impact future generations. Mainly set in a remote boarding school whose pupils have been defiled by their largely wealthy and uncaring parents, Club Zero revolves around a compelling new teacher, played by Mia Wasikowska, whose radical instruction in her conscious eating class eventually leads to the downfall of its young members.
Miss Novak (Wasikowska) is the newest teacher at The Talent Campus, where none of the pupils are particularly that gifted. She breezes through the school hallways with a waifish look and an unidentifiable European accent, adding mystery to the admiration she quickly gains from her students and fellow teachers. Teaching nutrition courses, Miss Novak shares the rationale behind her ideas of “conscious eating,” which she condones for its health benefits and resistance to mass consumerism. Taking in a small group of favorites –– including Elsa, who struggles with bulimia, and Fred, abandoned at boarding school when his parents strike up a business deal in Africa –– Miss Novak pinpoints the insecurities of her students and learns how to exploit their trust and loyalty. As her young followers become more devout to her teachings, some parents become concerned that Miss Novak’s impressions on their children are taking a concerning turn –– a significant effort on their part in consideration of their generally callous notions of child-rearing in the modern world –– incited by their offspring’s eventual refusals to eat anything at all. As Miss Novak’s newly-converted devotees learn of “Club Zero” and take their education to cult-like lengths, The Talent School and its student body are changed evermore.
Courtesy of Film Movement.
Through its screenplay, Club Zero makes fairly sharp, albeit fatalistic, commentary concerning the state of youthhood in the contemporary age. The students’ impressionability is probed from the start, with the insecurity they face both at school and in their home life a significant factor in their ability to be shaped and controlled. The groupthink adopted by Frank (Luke Barker), Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt), and the rest of their classmates is criticized through the scholars’ immature inability to critically consider their newfound beliefs. Difficulties arise as Hausner attempts to tie together these concepts with the direction she gives to her young actors. Serving flat performances dictated by the film’s austere direction, the students of The Talent Campus never feel like living, breathing, hormone-raging teenagers. Outside of their personal style, which varies from character to character, there is little distinction between Miss Novak’s band of followers. The film may oscillate between their perspectives, but the satirical edge that Club Zero strives for ultimately sacrifices any type of compelling character arc.
Always an actress who chooses challenging roles and exciting directors to work with, Wasikowska does her best with Miss Novak’s Pied Piper-inspired character, who never feels satisfyingly fleshed out by Club Zero’s screenplay. Flashes of her character’s self-doubt come into play in a few scenes, but the viewer is never granted enough context to understand what motivates Miss Novak’s desire to become cult leader-esque among her flock of students. Where is this woman from? Why does she not want to eat? What is in this fasting tea that she is pedaling to her admirers? While this class of spiritual snake peddler would undoubtedly aim for a certain enigmatical presence, Club Zero’s screenplay disservices Wasikowka’s performance through the opacity of how Miss Novak’s character is constructed, ultimately alienating viewers and robbing them of a more profound insight into the movie’s central personality.
Courtesy of Film Movement.
Through Miss Novak’s interactions and teachings to her favored pupils, Club Zero makes its long-winded ruminations on faith’s position in the modern world. Besides Ben, a working-class student attending The Talent Campus on a full scholarship, all of the teens have very detached relationships with their parents, particularly as they seem to disappoint their brood time and time again. This lack of belief in their family allows the students to turn to Miss Novak’s guidance almost too easily in the movie’s portrayal. In a world seemingly barren of family devotion or even camaraderie with their classmates, the teenagers put their faith in Miss Novak, increasingly more open to her unnatural hypotheses. Club Zero’s empty condemnations of mass consumerism feel much less intriguing than the film’s fixations on faith: shallow nods to environmentalism and the damaging caste systems of Capitalism float through the movie’s storyline with minimal impact.
Despite Club Zero’s overly ambitious thematic ideas, the film’s visual language is wholly realized in a manner supportive of its stony, clinical satire. Costume designer Tanja Hausner and production designer Beck Rainford work in tandem to support the cold, off-kilter world that the director works to create. Much like Hausner’s last work, 2019’s Little Joe, disarming pops of red and green are used throughout the movie, juxtaposing with the empty, ultra-modern interiors where much of Club Zero takes place. The bright lime school uniforms create a peculiar clash with the students who wear them, especially as Miss Novak’s disciples grow paler and more sickly looking as they become ensnared by her teachings. Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht maintains firm control over his camera, creating static, widescreen images punctuated with slow zooms in and out, which emphasize the faces of the pupils and their increasingly bizarre behavior under their new tutelage. The craft of Club Zero comes together to create possibly the most captivating aspects of the film, a welcoming reprieve from the increasingly disparate ideas that Hausner’s screenplay attempts to tie together.
Hausner’s Club Zero is absolutely a film filled with engaging visions of the modern world, but the final product is not equal to the sum of its parts. Chasing the sort of satire reminiscent of Yorgo Lanthimos’s early work, Club Zero misses the pointedness and cruelty that makes black comedy so intriguing. Instead, it serves a movie that often feels lusterless despite its boundary-pushing subject matter and thoughtful craft. Club Zero made its world premiere in competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Film Movement will handle the movie’s theatrical release in the United States, which begins Friday, March 15.
2.5/5
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