Club Zero

DVD Features

Interview with director Jessica Hausner
Interview with star Mia Wasikowska
Jessica Hausner Masterclass from the Munich International Film Festival

Discs: 1

• Highest Rating
  "Audaciously disturbing....[a] gripping and provocative mind-fuck....harrowingly funny....boundary-smashing....a skillful and daring filmmaker."
  Owen Gleiberman, Variety
• Highest Rating
  "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)."
  Sheila O'Malley , RogerEbert.com
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  Charles Bramesco, The Playlist
• Highest Rating
  "Buñuelian in its ingenuity....[a] scabrous black comedy, a stick of dynamite handled with care."
  Alex Denney, AnOther Magazine
• Highest Rating
  "[Hausner's] most methodical and chilling film."
  Blake Williams, Filmmaker Magazine
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  Patrice Witherspoon, Screen Rant
• Highest Rating
  "[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."
  Sabina Dana Plasse, Film Threat
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  Alissa Wilkinson, Vox
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  Marya E. Gates, RogerEbert.com
• Highest Rating
  "A real head-turner of a film."
  Wendy Ide, Screen
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  Stephanie Bunbury, Deadline
• Highest Rating
  "Hausner’s latest is delightfully subversive...."
  Nicholas Bell, Ion Cinema
• Highest Rating
  "4/4 stars. A provocative, edgy film recommended for thoughtful audiences…"
  Film Authority
• Highest Rating
  "Funny, disturbing, provocative and full of interesting observations about our relationship with food."
  Zhuo-Ning Su, Awards Daily
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, AWFJ.org
• Highest Rating
  "[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."
  M.G. Mailloux, In Review Online
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  Ankit Jhunjhunwala, Screen Anarchy
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  Mario Neves, NY Sun
• Highest Rating
  "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. "
  Kevin Parks, The Movie Buff
• Highest Rating
  "Delicious to watch"
  Victor Fraga, Dirty Movies
• Highest Rating
  "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."
  William Repass, Slant