Club Zero

11 yrs 110 minutes • 2023 • 5.9

Club Zero takes place in a prestigious school, where a group of students have their diets and then their lives turned upside down by a newly employed nutrition specialist. Miss Novak specializes in so-called “conscious eating”, a practice that, given enough time, will make the body self-sufficient so that there is no need to eat at all. Most students taking this elective course quit quite quickly, but the remaining five devote themselves to the diet almost religiously. And in front of their co-students and parents they are turned into a starved, brainwashed cult.

Austrian Jessica Hausner is known for acclaimed movies such as The Miracle in Lourdes and Little Joe, and is often mentioned together with Ulrich Seidl and Michael Haneke. Like her countrymen she likes to pick the scabs of the middleclass wounds, and she does it in her own unmistakable style. Club Zero is another example of this – a stylistic and current satire over society’s confused relationship with health, food and body ideals.