Club Zero Reviews (original) (raw)

Summary At an international boarding school, an unassuming, yet rigorous teacher, Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska), joins the 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 earl...

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It’s creepy as hell, watching these kids with no purpose and a desperate need to be doing something important become sucked into notions about self-control and salvation.

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.

What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.

Hausner is clearly talented, and I’m all for a film without easy answers. But I wish this one was less insistently opaque.

Club Zero is less a cautionary tale about eating disorders than a satire on environmental anxieties, extreme activism, and the sometimes-competitive nature of those who get swept up in it. That’s a tasty premise, but Hausner’s take is frankly a cynical one and, much like the plate of vomit that dominated headlines after the film’s premiere last week in Cannes, it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.

While the group of actors who play the students offer strong performances, particularly Luke Barker, Ksenia Devriendt, and Florence Baker, Hausner's meandering feature eventually concludes without a real ending.

Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption.

Tirando sarro desde os veganos ao padrão estético da magreza, é um filme de baixo orçamento muito simpático, que se passa numa escola tradicional na qual uma turma de alimentação consciente é guiada pela estranhíssima professora a reduzir cada vez mais a ingestão de alimentos. Particularmente, gosto do tom intimista na primeira metade, porém, essa edição vai cansando ao decorrer do longa, em especial pelo fato de que pouca coisa realmente relevante e impactante acontece (à exceção de algumas cenas, como a dovômito, que realmente deu um embrulho). As atuações dos jovens estão ainda a baixo da média, pelo menos o tom letárgico é adequado. A cena final com a "Última ceia" ficou bastante irônica, mas é o tipo de filme cujo roteiro bizarro, infelizmente, não se firma imageticamente falando.

'Club Zero' is an ineffective satire that strangely mixes the concept of cults and eating disorders. Mia Wasikowska plays an enigmatic private school teacher who teaches her students to "eat consciously" to save the world and themselves. Director Jessica Hausner proposes an uncomfortable and visually attractive concept aiming to explore our relationship with consumption, "gurus" and the food industry. Still, it doesn't elaborate on any theme, even creating a confusing and problematic plot. The Austrian borrows stylistic and narrative elements from Yorgos Lanthimos (complete with his deadpan humor) and Ruben Östlund to make a supposed criticism of the elite and the questionable practices that "experts" dangerously popularize without arguments However, Hausner falls a bit into the latter by not being able to sustain a plot that soon demonstrates how empty it is. Visually, it seems like we're entering a universe shaped by a minimalist version of Wes Anderson that prioritizes style over substance at all times. In the end, 'Club Zero,' which feels more like a collection of sketches than a movie, is nothing more than a completely failed exercise whose flat characters hang around in the service of a plot that never bothers to develop them.

Production Company Coop99 Filmproduktion, Coproduction Office, ARTE, Arte France Cinéma, Austrian Film Institute, BBC Film, Cinema Inutile, Club Zero, Det Danske Filminstitut, Doha Film Institute, Essential Filmproduktion GmbH, Filmstandort Austria (FISA), Gold Rush Films, Gold Rush Pictures, Obala Art Centar, Paloma Productions, Parisienne de Production, TRT 1 Türk Sinemasi, The Danish Film Institute Archive, Turkish Radio & Television (TRT), Vienna Film Financing Fund, ZDF Enterprises, ZDF Studios, ZDF/Arte, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF)

Release Date Mar 15, 2024

Duration 1 h 50 m

Palic Film Festival

• 1 Win & 2 Nominations

Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival

• 1 Win & 2 Nominations