Club Zero

Director: Jessica Hausner (Austria, UK, Germany, France, Denmark, Turkey, USA, Qatar, Bosnia and Herzgovina). Year of Release: 2023

An austere room with modernist furniture starts to fill up with teenagers wearing pale yellow shirts and long shorts which at first look like skirts. An older woman, whose top is a deeper yellow-orange colour asks them why they’re here. They give a variety of answers – to reduce body fat, to protect the environment, to oppose consumerism, to reject junk food. One smart arse says he’s doing the course because it offers him an easy credit which will allow him to pass his exams.

Miss Novak is the new nutrition teacher at a liberal public school. She is teaching her 7 new charges the idea of “conscious eating” – the idea if you pay more attention about what you are eating, you will eat less, and become ultimately more healthy. The kids are encouraged to cut their food into small portions, pause before they eat, take a breath, then hold the food on a fork in front of them before eventually, finally, popping the small morsel into their mouth.

Once she has got the kids used to conscious eating, Novak will encourage them to start a plant-based mono diet where they only eat one thing – preferably vegetable-based, and as little of it as possible. Once this has sunk in, she will introduce them to the idea of “Club Zero”, a secret society of people who have taught themselves to survive on eating nothing at all. Novak herself is a member, but is unsure whether she can find anyone else with the required self-control.

One by one, we are introduced to at least some of Novak’s class, each of whom is largely defined by their preferred extra-curricular activity. Fred is a dancer, preparing a coming performance of Peter and the Wolf for parents’ evening, Ragna is a trampolinist who needs to find the ideal weight between “too heavy” and “not enough bounce”. Ben is the academic who talked about getting an easy credit in the opening scene. Unlike the others, his single mother cannot afford to pay his fees.

Novak plays the kids off against each other, against their parents, and against the school’s ineffective principal Ms Dorset. She poses as a radical, saying “It frightens people when you question their truth,” but only to win the kids’ loyalty. She uses legitimate fears about consumerism to inculcate unquestioning loyalty. 2 of the original 7 drop out of the course because they’re worried about where she is heading. The remaining 5 become increasingly monomaniacal.

I think that the thing which made Club Zero for me was the eerie appearance of pubescent kids who were not quite able to cope with their growing agency – reminiscent of 1960s films like Children of the Damned and The Innocents. There is something just disturbing about a group of teenagers who are starting to understand abstract thought which means that they think that they understand everything while they clearly don’t.

Club Zero is a satire, of course it is, and its effectiveness depends firstly on your willingness to go along with its frankly ludicrous premises, and secondly how much you get what it is actually satirising. On the first count, I scored quite highly – maybe I was just in a good mood, but there was something compelling about watching these kids who don’t really know any better being forced to choose between their adoration for a teacher who is unusually interesting and her mad ideas.

Things fall apart more easily if you misplace the object of abuse. Some critics appear to believe that Club Zero is mainly satirising environmental activists who just take things too far. If they just listened to their sensible parents, and not their madcap teachers, then the world would be a safer – and less subversive – place. This may be a secondary target of the satire, but taken on its own, this analysis is simply inadequate to explain the scenes which we see in front of us.

In particular, the parents – with the exception of Ben’s mother, who is dependent on him winning a scholarship to keep his school place – are no paragons of virtue themselves. Each, in their different ways, have abandoned their kids to a boarding school which will hopefully relieve them of awkward emotions like love. Fred’s parents would rather patronise people in Ghana than have a skype conversation with their son. Elsa’s refuse to confront her growling bulimia.

The most important dynamic in the film is that of class. This is seen in the parent’s ineffective relationship with their kids, but also in the way in which the school is run. It is the worst of all worlds – a liberal plutocracy. The parents’ council enables Novak’s dismissal, not because of the nonsense which she is telling their children, but because she was seen taking Fred to the opera. Such “Inappropriate” behaviour worries them much more than dangerous teaching methods.

Even if I’ve got it wrong, and writer/director Jessica Hausner had quite different targets in mind, for me Club Zero is an attack on the self-righteous smugness of the super-rich (or maybe even of the merely rich). Fads about starving yourself to save the planet are just not imaginable in societies which struggle to stay alive. I see the film as poking fun at the naive belief that a few rich people eating less would have any impact at all on the future of our planet.

At the same time, I think that Club Zero often either misses its targets or fails to be clear enough about which point it is trying to make. The more you think about it, the less coherent it is. I also think that some of the gross out scenes are both gratuitous and don’t go far enough. I mean someone eating their own sick is excessive but if you want to shock, why not show them eating someone else’s sick?

You’re left wandering whether you should criticise Club Zero for not going far enough (it doesn’t) or appreciating that at least one film has challenged bourgeois convention. A few reviews have compared Club Zero to Ruben Östlund’s films The Square and Triangle of Sadness. I think the comparison is unfair, not least because I always found a coldness in Östlund, whereas it feels that Club Zero really does care about its hideous characters.

In short: Club Zero is flawed, but it got an undue kicking from critics who were either unaware or unimpressed by the class-based elements of its subversion. But while you are watching the film it holds you, or at least me, in its grip. It is compelling, without being entirely convincing. Not the best film ever, but certainly worth a view.