Club Zero
At an international boarding school, an unassuming, yet rigorous, Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska) joins the teaching staff to instruct a new class on “conscious eating.” Her impressionable teenage students each have their own reasons for joining the class – to improve fitness, reduce their carbon footprint, or get extra credit. Although early lectures focus on mindful consumption, Miss Novak’s discussions soon become increasingly disordered and extreme. A suspicious headmistress, concerned parents and the failing health of her students lead everyone to question the inscrutable Miss Novak’s motivations for teaching the class. As a few devoted pupils fall deeper under her cult-like tutelage, they are given a new, even more sinister goal to aspire to – joining the ominous “Club Zero.”
Combining a pitch-black comedic sensibility with elements of body horror, CLUB ZERO satirizes contemporary inclinations toward myopic insularity and blind faith brought on by anxieties regarding food, consumerism and environmental catastrophe. “Riddled with uncomfortable dialogue, audacious sequences, and a piercing score,” this “future cult classic” (Screen Rant), which had its world premiere in competition at Cannes, is the latest from Austrian writer/director Jessica Hausner, one of Europe’s most fearless and provocative auteurs.
"Jessica Hausner’s CLUB ZERO, co-written by Géraldine Bajard, unsettles viewers in its matter-of-fact tone as the plot escalates and the students and their teacher aspire to starvation and salvation. The film’s examination of religious fervor and groupthink could prompt nuanced conversations in religious studies classes, as well as in certain psychology courses. A dark and disturbing plot combined with light and meticulous aesthetics – anchored by yet another brave performance from Mia Wasikowska – make CLUB ZERO a must-watch arthouse thriller that belongs on any narrative film collection’s shelves...CLUB ZERO would make for an original and unexpected addition to a film series about faith on film....suitable for academic courses studying religion, psychology, and especially group psychology. Content warnings for eating disorders would be advised prior to classroom screenings." - Video Librarian
Cast
- Mia Wasikowska
- Sidse Babett Knudsen
- Elsa Zylberstein
- Mathieu Demy
- Amir El-Masry
- Ksenia Devriendt
- Luke Barker
- Florence Baker
- Samuel D Anderson
- Gwen Currant
DVD Features
Interview with director Jessica Hausner
Interview with star Mia Wasikowska
Jessica Hausner Masterclass from the Munich International Film Festival
Discs: 1
- "Audaciously disturbing....[a] gripping and provocative mind-fuck....harrowingly funny....boundary-smashing....a skillful and daring filmmaker."
- "An intense entry in [Hausner's] exploration of ideas run amok, of fantasy overtaking reality to the degree that reality itself is called into question (and regarded as an enemy)."
- "The nattering, pulsating score that evokes tribal musical traditions gives away the real game here, Hausner’s focus most squarely placed on the stomach-turning efficacy with which insular thought protects and perpetuates itself."
- "Buñuelian in its ingenuity....[a] scabrous black comedy, a stick of dynamite handled with care."
- "[Hausner's] most methodical and chilling film."
- "Riddled with uncomfortable dialogue, audacious sequences, and a piercing score, Club Zero has all the ingredients to become a future cult classic. It’s for a great reason, too. The film contains a terrifying yet wonderful performance from Wasikowska, it includes brilliant commentary on the dangers of following blindly, and it provides great entertainment. The quirky script may not be for everyone, but my best guess is that no matter what you will think of this holistically, something in Club Zero will keep you talking."
- "[A] stylish, dystopian film that offers an interesting perspective on food and social alignments in contemporary bourgeois society…Quirky and uncomfortable but hard to turn away from, CLUB ZERO is reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, especially because it has a tone of below-average existence masked in contemporary and forward-thinking superficialities."
- "Jessica Hausner’s mannered, deadpan film buries body horror inside a satirical facade, using smart ideas about disordered eating — that it’s frequently a response to lack of control rather than about body size — to tell a story about grasping for transcendence in a frightening, confusing world."
- "Like her earlier films AMOUR FOU and LOURDES, Hausner's film explores fanaticism in many facets. How it can creep into someone's life slowly. How it can eat away at free will in the name of unwavering belief. With [CLUB ZERO], however, she walks the satirical line more successfully, eliciting laughs from the audience during scenes that really should be uncomfortable to watch. That is, until the movie slips completely into a kind of horror, turning on the audience just as subtly as Ms. Novak's words turned her students, leaving everyone feeling not very well indeed."
- "A real head-turner of a film."
- "Made with the anger and purpose of a documentary...There is a great deal to admire here in all this. There is a brilliant percussive score by Markus Binder, erupting as thumps and bangs like aural jump scares. There are those sharply constructed images and Hausner’s refusal to look away from uncomfortable facts. There are even moments of bitter humor. Just when we are convinced that Miss Novak is a complete charlatan, we find her immersed in private devotions to the Almighty Mother, a spirit apparently living inside a lily with a tealight burning between its petals. You have to laugh."
- "Hausner’s latest is delightfully subversive...."
- "4/4 stars. A provocative, edgy film recommended for thoughtful audiences…"
- "Funny, disturbing, provocative and full of interesting observations about our relationship with food."
- "Held aloft by an impressive raft of performances by her ensemble cast, Hausner’s darkly perverse vision of self-care run amok is brought powerfully to life by the actors who play her students, in particular Luke Barker who plays Fred, and as Elsa, played by Ksenia Devriendt who brings a volatile fearlessness to the part that is nothing less than electric."
- "[T]he film’s characterization of this culture amounts to a vast system in which we’ve all been webbed up, with no character — parent and child alike — more savvy than the next, all turning to some modern day higher power for a sense of guidance or control that they might better find amongst each other."
- "Hausner fashions an immensely sophisticated mis-en-scene, the framing and blocking and arrangement of people and objects within the frame showing exactitude we expect from the films of Wes Anderson or the like...Also pleasurable is the clarity of Hausner’s storytelling and screenplay construction."
- "With progressive bromides dominating the cultural landscape, films like CLUB ZERO offer welcome perspective...In the grand tradition of Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, and in-its-prime National Lampoon, Mses. Hausner and Bajard reveal extremism as being nihilism festooned in do-gooder drag."
- "Writer/Director Hausner (“Little Joe”) doesn’t force-feed the audience a morality tale, deftly mixing shocks with subtle depictions of pleasure, pain and pathos which offset the unforgettable, don’t-make-me-watch-moments. In a slow creep, “Club Zero” keeps the suspense building without unearned jolts, opting to unfurl the narrative through thoughtful character building, a haunting stringy score and bold Andersonian visuals. Tackling taboo subject matter—eating disorders, parental neglect and cult culture—“Club Zero” succeeds because it presents a disturbing, layered story at a slight remove, avoiding the predictable route of a cautionary fable that heaps pity on victims and scorn on the perpetrators. "
- "Delicious to watch"
- "With the film’s sucker punch of a final shot—a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper—Hausner reveals a curious symbiosis between fanaticism and ideology, which at first blush seem opposed to one another. Cults of personality, in no way inimical to, but dependent on, the excesses of capital, prop up the very status quo that they claim to resist. As long as grouplets of the self-righteous are willing to mortify their flesh for our sins, we can go on sinning with a free conscience."
Gallery
Awards & Recognition
Palme d'Or
Cannes Film Festival
Best Motion Picture
Sitges Film Festival
Golden Tower
Palic Film Festival
Best International Film
Munich Film Festival
Karlovy Vary Int'l. Film Festival
Chicago Int'l. Film Festival
Busan Int'l. Film Festival
Sarajevo Film Festival
Jerusalem Film Festival
Sydney Film Festival
Melbourne Int'l. Film Festival
You May Also Like...
