Club Zero

Writers: Jessica Hausner and Géraldine Bajard

Director: Jessica Hausner

After The Substancecomes another body horror, this time part produced by the BBC. Unsettling and odd, Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero explores strict dieting regimes in a posh school where a new teacher extols the virtues of conscious eating in an effort to save the world and free the spirit. Her selected pupils adore her but make no mistake, this is not an update of Dead Poets Society. Despite Hausner’s bright palette and stylised dialogue, Club Zero is a dark examination of teenage years.

However, occasionally, the film is overly committed to portraying a strange, privileged European society where the day schoolers return to their parents’ luxurious Modernist houses overlooking a lush green valley. In one mansion, the family is served their dinners by a maid who later presents a towering tray of pink and white meringues to visitors. Other pupils are boarders, their parents working on projects in Africa which stink of neo-colonialism. Only Ben (Samuel D Anderson) is from a poorish family. He merely chooses the nutrition class to earn credits for his scholarship.

Hausner’s attention to every plush detail occasionally threatens to override the story of a handful of teenagers drawn to a dangerous cult. Every shot is perfectly framed from the sushi artfully displayed on a platter to which one family sits down on Christmas Eve to the principal’s office, resplendently panelled with dark wood and filled with uncomfortable but beautiful Modernist chairs. And Tanya Hausner’s costumes are at times sumptuous; at others, hideous. The female parents and the teachers wear dresses and turbans that evoke the excesses of the 1980s, while the pupils wear sunshine yellow polo shirts, khaki culottes and ugly purple socks, which are hard to take one’s eyes off.

With so much to marvel over visually, the narrative takes second place. Mia Wasikowska’s Ms Novak encourages her small class to take up the habit of conscious eating, where they think about their food while chewing it methodically. They will find that they are less hungry. A few of the pupils are delighted with such a diet. Ragna (Florence Baker) wants to lose more body fat so she can excel in her favoured sport, trampolining, while bulimic Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt) is happy as it means that she has less in her stomach to throw up. Ballet dancer Fred’s (Luke Barker) reasons for engaging in such a routine appear to be based on the fact that he has a crush on Ms Novak; he would do anything for her.

There’s a suggestion, too, that the group of teens want to be different to their other classmates, and so they form a clique in which they are always together: less Mean Girls, more Lean Girls. However, as we never get to meet any of the other students, it’s difficult to see what the dieting students are reacting against. With all the grown-ups in the film, apart from Ben’s mother, being grandly self-centred, perhaps the teens’ commitment to conscious eating is nothing more than teenage rebellion, a 21^st-century style of rebellion, for sure.

But events take a darker turn when Ms Novak urges her charges not to eat anything at all and join the secretive Club Zero, which has members worldwide. Can Ragna, Elsa, Fred and Ben embark on such an impossible mission, or will the adults discover in time that Ms Novak is running nothing more than a suicide club?

While the protagonists discuss the problems with modern farming and the idea that food companies are encouraging us to eat more even as governments tell us to eat less, the overall message of Club Zero feels dangerously open-ended. There are no moral compasses in the film, and it comes close to glorifying eating disorders. Of course, the strangeness of the interiors and the acting go some way to presenting the film as a radical metaphor for Big Food and the power of cults, but Club Zero ultimately tastes a little sour.

Club Zero is in cinemas from 6th December.