CLUB ZERO - Mark Reviews Movies

Club Zero, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 14, 2024

A very shallow satire, Club Zero is about an extreme sort of indoctrination, performed by a teacher upon her young, impressionable students. One can take a lot from co-writer/director Jessica Hausner's movie, mainly in the way the filmmaker name-checks or alludes to a slew of issues that have been become bogeymen or sources of denial for the politically inclined or ignorant.

The movie is akin to a reactionary's worst-case view of education made manifest and revealed as even more dangerous than such people could believe. Considering some of the more outrageous theories that float around these days, that's saying something.

In other words, the movie feels irresponsible in the current political climate, on top of not being especially funny or insightful about how and why people become caught up in extreme beliefs. The latter part matters more, of course, but the first part is worth noting, regardless.

The teacher at the center of the story is the mysterious Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska), who arrives at an expensive and exclusive boarding school with one mission in mind. She teaches a new kind of nutrition program called "conscious eating." At first, this simply appears to mean that her students take their time to appreciate the food they're eating, taking a single bite on a fork and staring at it with consideration before putting the morsel in the mouth.

It "works," whatever that's supposed to mean in terms of a process that's never really explain except by way of what it isn't and why it's important in broader terms. Students like Ragna (Florence Baker), whose vegan father (played by Lukas Turtur) suggested Miss Novak for the school, and Fred (Luke Barker), a dancer whose parents are currently working on a humanitarian project in Ghana, start to appreciate what they eat more and, as a result, eat less at each meal. The obvious downside to this, obviously, is that a student like Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt), who suffers from bulimia before the new teacher's arrival, essentially learns a different kind of way to damage her body by not getting proper nutrition.

As it turns out, this is the point of Miss Novak's program. She keeps a few things about it to herself, such as the fact that it possesses a religious angle, as she prays to some divine maternal figure about "saving" all these kids, and the ultimate, unbelievable goal of "conscious eating." She basically believes that human beings don't need to eat food in order to survive, and while student Ben (Samuel D Anderson) is rightly suspicious of such an outlandish claim, it's not long before this quartet, along with classmate Helen (Gwen Currant), stop eating entirely for an assortment of reasons.

Some are fears about the future of the world, which would seem reasonable in general but here are contextualized as unnecessary fearmongering. Some, such as in the case of Ben, are the results of old-fashioned peer pressure, although the movie is so vague in its ideas that we never actually see or believe this kid's transformation, and in Fred's case, it's because Miss Novak treats him with the kind of attention, affection, and respect that don't come from his parents. Otherwise, the kids are basically doing exactly what they want to, but now, they have an excuse that justifies their behavior from an authority figure whom their parents intrinsically trust.

To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with a story such as this one, which distrusts authority and questions why parents are so keen to give up some influence of their children to a relative stranger. If anything, the movie makes a good case that teachers shouldn't be strangers to parents and that education shouldn't be a one-way street.

The problem is that Hausner and co-screenwriter Géraldine Bajard take this self-apparent notion to such an extreme that it turns teachers into sinister manipulators or ignorant accomplices (The principal, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, misses the obvious, even when Miss Novak tells it to her plainly), parents into people who mean too well to do any good, and students into idiots who will believe anything and need to be told how to live—just not, apparently, in any manner or with any opinion that the filmmakers think could lead to dangerous consequences.

What are those manners and opinions, though? Club Zero pretty much lets us know without saying anything especially outright, and maybe the way that attitude reflects some real-world conspiracies about education makes this satire feel particularly sour. Mainly, it's just thin and repetitive in terms of its single joke.

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