‘Club Zero’ Review – Consumerism And Morality Clash

An elite private boarding school is the perfect place for harmful belief systems to breed and take hold of impressionable youth which is exactly what happens in Club Zero. Jessica Hausner (Little Joe) directs her second English language film co-written with Géraldine Bajard (Lamb). Mia Wasikowska stars as Ms Novak a new teacher hired to coach her students in ‘conscious eating’ as a means to achieve their goals. Markus Binder’s score creates a foreboding atmosphere with rhythmic drums, harsh strings, and meditative ‘’oms’’ that allude to how cults are born.

Wasikowska’s Ms Novak is not the typical cult leader we are used to seeing. She is not extraverted, flamboyant, or charismatic. Wasikowska plays the character as sincere with a genuine desire to help her students. But as the film progresses, we witness that ‘conscious eating’ is not the end goal of her class. The horror of what she is doing is in the subtlety of how she achieves it. The seven students are away from home, their parents absent and preoccupied with work or charitable activities. Ms Novak, like most cult leaders, is able to capitalise on this absence.

Coupled with her students’ low self-esteem and the pressure they feel to succeed in an already competitive environment, her techniques are successful. In the beginning, she uses real scientific terms, such as autophagy, a natural cellular process, to encourage her students to restrict their food for health benefits.  During these private meetings, Ms Novak reminds her students that it’s not ‘’easy to do the right thing’’. Club Zero posits several interesting ideas about the relationship between food and morals.

Religious scholar Alan Levinovitz has written extensively on this subject, where he explains how moral superiority, identity, and food are intrinsically linked and play a role in what we eat. These are the very ideas that Ms Novak uses to coerce her students to drastically reduce the food they eat and eventually stop eating altogether. So successful are her techniques that her students eventually start berating each other when they fall short of her standards. There is an emphasis on pleasing Ms Novak, wanting to be liked, accepted, and to succeed in her class, even when this ‘success’ puts one of the students in hospital.

As an audience, we don’t learn what Club Zero is immediately as the majority of the film is spent indoctrinating us with Ms Novak’s ideas of moral superiority and reducing consumerism. We feel what her students feel: hungry, isolated, and guilty. In direct conflict with these feelings, her students’ unmet needs for love, attention, and encouragement are what keep them coming back. Ms Novak lavishes attention on them, making a point to commend them when they drastically restrict their meals. The students who remain in her class speak with a flat affect and outside of their desire to restrict we don’t learn much about them as individuals. This is a clever way to highlight how eating disorders take hold of an individual, the obsession and secrecy dominating one’s life to the point where they physically and figuratively start to disappear.

Described as a comedy, drama, and thriller, Club Zero sadly lacks in all three genres as the pacing and characterisation of the students is a serious problem. The film moves at a glacial pace where as an audience we’re forced to endure these private meetings of indoctrination where the students rarely challenge what they are being taught. There is a lack of conflict throughout the film as the parents lack the gumption to raise any concerns with the school in a formidable way.

Their meek protests are triggered by a rumour of alleged inappropriate contact – not Ms Novak’s unusual and harmful rhetoric and its dangerous effects. It would have been more effective to see what the students were like before enrolling in Ms Novak’s class to better emphasise the harm of her teachings. The students are not particularly outspoken or strong-willed, thereby they make for easy targets and this lack of push-back deprives the film of necessary drama. Only one student in the programme resists albeit for a brief period but it’s not long before they fall in line.

Despite these shortcomings, Club Zero raises interesting philosophical questions through the interrogation of Ms Novak’s actions: In a secular environment what does it mean to save and be saved? Is it possible to live completely free and separate from man-made systems?  How much consumption is too much consumption? How safe are children in these elite institutions?  The most interesting character in Club Zero, by design, is Ms Novak. Her unmarried and childless state is weaponised and simultaneously used to excuse her behaviour. She is pitied and revered by the students and their parents.

As the film ends on an ambiguous note, we are left to meditate on Ms Novak’s actions and their impact on her students. Indoctrination of harmful ideas rarely succeeds without implicit trust being gifted to those in positions of power. Abuse does not always look like abuse, sometimes it looks like tender loving care. Club Zero is a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when a desire to be ‘good’ goes too far.

Club Zero will debut in select theaters on March 15, 2024, courtesy of Film Movement. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrt2CjWWMnI]