Club Zero
Directed by Jessica Hausner
Written by Jessica Hausner and Geraldine Bajard
Starring Mia Wasikowska, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Elsa Zylberstein
Unrated
110 Minutes
In Theaters March 15

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Club Zero, the new film directed and co-written by Jessica Hausner, is difficult to sit through. After opening with a content warning, you watch teenagers starve themselves, induce vomiting and even eat said vomit, all under the guidance of a teacher who quickly develops an iron grip on their every thought and action. Somewhere over the film's two hours, as you're staring at an emaciated, sallow high school kid, you may wonder when Hausner is going to make her point and reveal where this has all been headed. You may continue to wonder forever.

The film is Hausner's newest look at fanaticism, one of her pet themes. It takes place at an upper-crust international boarding school somewhere in Europe (Hausner is Austrian and the film was shot in England, but we barely see anything outside campus and the interiors of the students' homes, which gives everything a great eerie feeling, like the film could take place anywhere or nowhere), and examines seven students enrolled in a "conscious eating" class. Their teacher, Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska) is new, but has been selected by the students' parents and has her own brand of "fasting tea." She's an expert in autophagy, the dubious process whereby a person's body self-cleans, renews cells and discards waste. You get there by starving. I looked it up afterward and autophagy is real, or at least a thing that real people argue exists. It's real in the same way Dan Quinn thought stevia unlocked cold fission.

The students have all signed up for the conscious eating course for reasons they're entirely open about but that mostly don't seem especially connected to eating (i.e. increasing PSAT scores, decreasing consumerist impulses). The big technique Novak employs to help them reach these goals involves taking a small bit of food on your fork, staring at in intense, quiet reflection and then, sometimes, taking a bite, treating every calorie like a Marie Kondo exercise. The students who see the process through to the end go from eating very little to eating nothing at all (save some fasting tea). One student is bulimic, and while Novak discourages purging, she's merely pushing a different kind of eating disorder. Novak gets her hooks in the kids early by being young and understanding, and gets a little invasive boost by being the teacher who watches over the students who don't go home on weekends. She's a parental figure who interacts with many of the kids more than their actual parents do. By the film's halfway point, they're completely under her spell. Even the principal has fallen for it.

There's a flat affect and remoteness to a lot of dark comedies like this now, partially brought on by people like Hauser but made especially popular by filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos (with a little bit of Wes Anderson). The problem here is the movie isn't very funny. A flat comedy, especially a satire, can feel subversive, but a flat drama feels lacking, and the punchlines just don't hit well enough here for Club Zero to feel as dangerous as it thinks it is.

Still, you've got Mia Wasikowska in the lead role. Wasikowska makes interesting choices and even if a film is dim, even if she's billed below somebody like Shia LaBeouf, I know she's going to be good and that something about the film will be interesting. After breaking out in 2010, playing one of the kids in the great The Kids Are All Right and the title character in Tim Burton's bizarrely successful Alice in Wonderland adaptation (the second-highest grossing film of its year!), she went right back to idiosyncratic work, showing up in movies like Only Lovers Left Alive, Damsel and Stoker. For every more straightforward thing she's made, i.e. playing the leads in Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary films, she's got a couple movies like Piercing in her filmography that make her, like her co-star in that film, Christopher Abbott, an essential actor to watch. Club Zero is not a good movie, but Mia Wasikowska is very good in it. When the jokes do work, as when Novak calmly explains that all food is bad for a person's body and mind, it's because Wasikowska's the one saying them.

Novak's autophagy philosophy leads to a lot of "Yet you participate in society!" justifications. If nobody ate, one student posits, nobody would starve due to poverty. The students eventually get so brainwashed that they accuse a classmate eating three potato wedges of gluttony (she should have eaten one). And then, as the authoritarianism has really ramped up, autophagy actually kicks in. The girl eating the least announces she's aced a recent test without studying. The starving students clear gymnastics trials, piano recitals and play productions. The eating disorder has positive results. One of the kids stops taking his insulin. That same kid turns on one of his classmates when he "smells food" on her breath. And then in the next scene, he's in the hospital, but there's a lingering question of whether he was right to stop eating. Novak is fired at the parents' insistence, but the damage, both physical and mental, has been done. These kids believe not eating has lent them the ability to control the weather and disease. One student threatens to make it rain. And then it does. And the question continues to linger.

So what is this movie? It's an alien takeover, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers story where Miss Novak is the first invader. It's also a fable, and you realize how close it hews to the Pied Piper of Hamelin as the movie continues. In that story, a town's children were taken away as retribution for their parents not paying an exterminator. By the end of Club Zero, Novak's most dedicated pupils have left home forever, leaving behind letters explicitly meant to sound like suicide notes. The parents pushed back against the teacher they hired and she took their children.

I don't take my moral cues from fables for the same reasons I don't plan my day around Jack Chick Tracts. But at least a fable lets you know something-- what a society thought of as the right way to live, what people believed they had to look out for, etc. There are German folktales about kids dying because they don't drink their soup, and I wouldn't imbue my kid with the lesson that he must either eat soup or die, but it's fascinating to go through that fable and think "Wow, the most important thing to this culture, at least for a time, was an epidemic of kids not appreciating their parents' labor." But this is a fable without a moral.

I don't think Club Zero is saying anything and I don't think it tells me anything about the director and writers besides "They enjoy Yorgos Lanthimos' films, especially Dogtooth, but don't have it in them to go full Buñuel." It lacks the conviction to pick a real target and it lacks the courage to say anything about the potential targets it seems like it's setting up anyway. What I'm trying to say, and this stuff gets a little too wispy when you (read: I) try to put it into words, is that the autophagy of Club Zero is a metaphor for something and is being used to criticize something, but Hausner isn't handling any of this well. There isn't even enough here for me to know how Hausner feels about anything.

The best way to examine my hesitations with the film's themes is probably to examine who it's actually treating with scorn here. Who is being targeted? Who failed the kids? Not the kids themselves. Not even really the principal. It's the teacher and the parents. The wolf and the shepherds that let the wolf in to prey on their flock. It judges both pretty hard, but especially goes after the parents. Should the parent characters have refused to let their kids interact with new people? That's about all you can glean from this thing. They try to right their wrongs numerous times, but the film keeps them on blast.

I'm asking all of this-- about the film's targets, its judgments, the implicit and direct solutions it provides-- because I'm trying to give it credit. I'm trying to find a way to avoid noting that it feels borderline offensive to release a movie about a teacher indoctrinating students into a self-destructive and delusional way of living against their parents' wishes. Maybe Austrian and British societies aren't like this at all. But I'm watching this film with North American contexts and teachers have been accused of radicalizing students here since we've had teachers. When Miss Novak's brightest students are invited to join the Club Zero of the film's title, we discover it's a movement of people who have sworn off eating completely. 'How is it possible?' one student asks. 'Why would we deny something that obviously works just because we don't understand the science?' Miss Novak answers. That's the moment you're invited to let this movie serve as a metaphor for one of the thousand Big Topics of the past decade. Anti-vaxxers, people who show up for fascist politicians, conspiracy theorists, whoever-- it's all the same mindset guiding people toward oblivion. You could play this as a double feature with Sound of Freedom for all of its arguing that 'Well, if you disagree with my deranged theory, which is all about helping children, you must hate children.'

Okay! Cool! But this is also the basis of LibsofTikTok: Teachers enlist students into their woke mind virus cult and now they all believe they're trans. And you need to be a better writer, a better filmmaker, a smarter, more empathetic person, to pull off a movie like Club Zero that could, without stretching, look like some QAnon bullshit. If you believe in Pizzagate, you believe everything this movie is saying about schools.

It is in no way difficult to compare the philosophies of people like Chaya Raichik and a film like Club Zero. At best, this is a film about how you shouldn't trust people. At worst, it's a 1:1 metaphor for the past few years of totally garbage conservative thought, that the people we entrust with our children's safety are taking that power and secretly introducing kids to a nonsense lifestyle that leads to them hurting themselves.

Maybe that isn't true. Maybe this is more accurate: At best, the film is handling the most charged topics in recent popular conversation to provoke, but gets incompetent when the time comes to evaluate any of them. The generous interpretation here is that Hausner is oblivious. If I give her any credit, I'm saying she made a film that directly reflects what your most algorithm-damaged, Joe Rogan-listening relatives believe happens in schools.

The movie ends with one of the kids looking directly at the camera and telling the audience they'll be saved if they have faith. Like many fourth-wall breaking moments, this is probably intended to be clever. In Club Zero, it's the final example of a movie increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the propaganda it thinks it's tittering at, like a clown making fun of the person he sees in a mirror.