Club Zero

Viewer Advice: Strong impact disordered eating themes, contains discussions of suicide.

In Jessica Hausner’s (Amour Fou, MIFF 2014; Lourdes, MIFF 2010) bold satire, a charismatic teacher convinces her teenage students that disordered eating can produce many kinds of enlightenment.

Health entrepreneur Miss Novak arrives at an exclusive boarding school for the children of Europe’s wealthy elite to teach ‘conscious eating’. At first, her course seems benign: avoid snacks and processed foods; choose smaller portions; eat slowly and meditatively. But then she initiates her favourite students into Club Zero, whose members don’t eat food at all. Soon, the teenagers are viciously competing to starve their bodies, believing they’re empowering their minds.

Meticulously scripted, designed and directed, this bone-dry satire, which screened in competition at Cannes, recalls both the mannered aesthetic of Wes Anderson and the deadpan wit of Yorgos Lanthimos. Mia Wasikowska (Bergman Island, MIFF 2021; Judy & Punch, MIFF 2019) is unsettlingly serene as Miss Novak, but Hausner reserves her harshest critique for other, negligent adults: the students’ self-absorbed parents and the school’s status-hungry headmistress (played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, The Duke of Burgundy, MIFF 2015). Cleverly navigating its heavier themes of disordered eating and teacher–student grooming, Club Zero emerges as a provocative allegory for the seductive solipsism of certainty.

“Supremely audacious and disturbing … A parable of kids being kidnapped from their parents by the bad ideas the culture spoonfeeds them.” – Variety