Movies starring Mia Wasikowska used to make waves but when Club Zero came out in 2023 it did so to little fanfare and then more or less disappeared.
This seems to be the way Wasikowska would like it. After a run including Alice in Wonderland for Tim Burton, Jane Eyre for Cary Fukunaga, Crimson Peak for Guillermo Del Toro and Stoker for Park Chan-wook, she seemed to deliberately left-turn her already arthouse-adjacent career into more rarefied territory – Damsel for the Zellner brothers, The Devil All the Time for Antonio Campos and Bergman Island for Mia Hansen-Løve.
That’s the niche Club Zero sits in. Written and directed by Jessica Hausner, whose films situate audiences inside alternate mindsets/pathologies – religious fervour in Lourdes, the romantic movement with Amour Fou and groupthink more generally in Little Joe – it’s about a school for well-to-do kids who are all taken on a wild ride by their teacher, the very cool Ms Novak.
Ms Novak starts with the bar set low, preaching the gospel of “conscious eating”, something many socially alert teens might be interested. But bit by bit she moves them out into increasingly unfamiliar territory. Ultimately the kids are being encouraged not to eat anything at all – this is Club Zero, which only the most ardent, the most elite may join.
“Most people are convinced they need to eat in order to live,” Ms Novak tells them as they are approaching these elevated heights. Having weeded out the less compliant, she can preach her own brand of truthism to minds ready to be moulded.
What sort of kids fall for this crap, you might wonder. Hausner has a assembled a gang of plausibles – among them Ragna (Florence Baker), the trampolinist who wants to be more in the moment. Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt), an anorexic kid taking after her anorexic mum. Ballet-loving Fred (Luke Barker), who hopes controlling his food intake will have a positive impact on his diabetes. Ben (Samuel D Anderson), the guy taking part because it might be an easy way of getting his grades up. Joan (Sade McNichols-Thomas), a matter-of-fact black teenager whose skin colour marks her out as something of an outsider – along with Ben a likely candidate for an early exit?
Comedy thriller, says the blurb, which struck me as a wild way of describing it. Cold, hard satire, more like, with barely a laugh to be had anywhere, though Ragna’s parents worrying aloud about the effects of consumerism while surrounded by consumerist tat made me bark.
Satire, like jazz, is delicious hot but less palatable cold and Club Zero is definitely at the cool end of the scale. It is almost heroically heavy handed and has said most of what it needs to say by the halfway mark. Still, it’ll be eagerly scarfed down (wrong metaphor) in some quarters, where it’ll be taken as a timely attack on woke, though Hausner seems to have a broader target – the workings of ideology itself.
The film’s real strength derives from the meticulous way, in tight little scenes, it charts the process of the kids’ indoctrination, in particular Ms Novak’s weaponisation of the kids’ own interpersonal relations to achieve her goal. Wasikowska is excellent as the chilly, approval-demanding Ms N, and there’s a particularly good performance (as ever) by Sidse Babett-Knudsen as the school principal, a woman whose common sense is at war throughout with her open mind.
Hausner is Austrian and though her film is set in the UK, it feels throughout as if we’re in the Germanosphere. Possibly that is Wasikowska’s possibly slightly Germanic (Scandi?) accent. Possibly it all just looks a touch too clean to be Britain, though these are meant to be posh kids and they live different lives. Possibly it’s the lensing by Hausner’s regular cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, who lights everything with clinical, almost forensic austerity.
Watching it you might be reminded of those cranks who used to turn up in newspapers, claiming to be living on nothing at all. Breatharians, they were sometimes called. They were a newspaper age phenomenon – it suited the papers not to question the scientific basis of what they were claiming, just as it suited them later on to reveal the breatharian’s empty pizza boxes in their bins. Club Zero has half an eye on those pizza boxes too. You might feel peckish while watching.
Club Zero – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
