Weirdo Mia Wasikowska Is Back And Weirder Than Ever In The Wellness Satire 'Club Zero'

By Jason Adams | Film | March 14, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | March 14, 2024 |

In the opening scene of the wellness satire (or is it?) Club Zero, a classroom full of teenagers at an exclusive and elite prep school sit in a circle and explain all of the reasons they have for wanting to take this new elective called “Conscious Eating,” wherein they will learn to think deeply, profoundly, about each and every bite of food they take. One wants to be healthier. Another wants to save the planet. One just needs the credits. And their new teacher Ms. Novak tells them with a wry smile that they’re all correct—these are all perfectly wonderful reasons to take the class.

And as played with the steadfast weirdo determination that steadfast weirdo Mia Wasokoswska brings to the role, it’s easy to believe her. Because even as Ms. Novak’s ideas get bigger and way more outrageous—like hey what if human beings don’t actually need to eat at all?—it’s impossible not to be fascinated by this oddball creature. Right off a cliff.

Please do understand that I use the word “oddball” and its synonyms here as the highest form of praise. When I say that Wasikowska has turned out to be the perfect little oddball, I mean it as the most exquisite of compliments. But man, what a weirdo. I suppose when your most mainstream collaboration is playing the semi-straight man to a bobble-headed Helena Bonham Carter in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (a deeply ugly movie that inexplicably made over a billion dollars) there’s no place to go but weirder. But Mia … Mia bless her heart has taken that challenge on headfirst.

Now 35-years-old, Mia has already worked with a circus’ worth of subversive iconoclasts like Park-Chan-wook, John Hillcoat, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Ayoade, John Curran, the Zellner Brothers (and as an aside please go watch Damsel immediately if you haven’t already), Mia Hansen-Løve, Nicolas Pesce, and Guillermo Del Toro. And she has given exceptional turns for every single one of them. (And that’s without even mentioning her Jane Eyre, the best cinematic Jane Eyre of the bunch… and Jane Eyre… well, you wanna talk about a weirdo?)

Point being, it’s no surprise that Mia might’ve seen one of Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s deeply strange and dryly provocative previous films, like perhaps her 2019 movie Little Joe—which was about biologically-engineered plants that pollinate and colonize human feelings, and which co-starred Ben Whishaw (who in some ways feels like Male Mia Wasikowska to me)—and decided that yes, this is a person that she needed to work with immediately.

Which brings us around to Club Zero, Hausner’s striking and purposefully abrasive new oddity out in theaters this weekend, after premiering to some deeply mixed reactions at Cannes. Walking a tight-rope between satire and surrealism, Club Zero takes aim at … well, a whole lot of things. Wellness communities, modern liberal parenting, unstructured schooling, eating disorders, cults. And Hausner swipes at the lot of it with her cold, color-coordinated, Haneke-ish remove—also think Yorgos Lanthimos, or even better think Peter Strickland. (Always think peter Strickland, if you ask me.) And Hausner forces us to wonder just what in the hell she’s getting at with her provocations.

Which I appreciate! Admittedly, in the context of this precise movie, using the phrase “being spoon fed” takes on a moribund tinge. But I very much appreciate the way that Hausner’s films insist on making us question everything, all while ultimately providing us with little to no answers in return. If we have room for satires of our current moment in time that spell out their messages in gigantic bold letters and slaps across the face—think The Menu and Triangle of Sadness—then we should also make some space for more unsettled visions like this. Movies that kick out our legs from beneath us only to immediately run out of the room, leaving us dazed, confused, picking up the scattered pieces of our brains and trying to remember which way was up.

So Ms. Novak’s class starts out simply enough, with her making convincing arguments about mindfulness and about having a consideration for the things we put inside of our body. It’s basically just slow-chewing, and nobody ever died from chewing their food the right number of times. That’s a thing that our grandmothers told us to do! And Ms. Novak has her beautifully designed flash cards, with their easy-to-grasp icons and charts on good foods and bad foods—it all goes down so easy. She even has her own brand of tea she’s shilling with her smiling face plastered on the box! What could possibly go wrong?

Of course slowly but surely the big red Xs start crowding in on those tables and graphs, and this nice quiet smiling creature introduces her students to the concept of her “Club Zero”—the ultimate destination, the place where the mind can finally overcome the body’s need for any food at all. A few skeptical students have peeled off by then, of course. But for five diehards, each with their own reasons and mixed-up homelives, Ms. Novak gives them each a clarity and a purpose they have never known before. It’s religious ecstasy, is what it is.

Calling back to Hausner’s 2009 film Lourdes (which was about a paralyzed Christian making the pilgrimage to that titular holy site and becoming rebuilt by her faith, much to the disbelief of those around her) this is very much a movie about religious thinking. Even more than it is about the disordered eating that it uses to get us there. And while Club Zero’s satiric punchlines seem at first glance to land squarely on its face-value targets, like Rose Glass’ Saint Maud there seems to me to be here a genuine flirtation with self-destruction; one that makes Hausner’s movies more complicated (and disturbing) than their poppy bright and stone-faced scenes initially let on to.

It’s not that I don’t think Hausner isn’t skeptical of magical thinking. Right around the time one of the students begins eating their own vomit it’s pretty clear she is. But Hausner simultaneously refuses to not comprehend, and transmit, the appeal of overcoming the physical for the metaphysical. Even very nearly dangerously so. Wasikowska plays Novak with such pleasant conviction, and nearly every single person who opposes the teacher does so with dubious reasons—the parents are all grotesquely self-interested, as is the rest of the school’s staff (including the great Sidse Babett Knudsen of Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy).

Ms. Novak seems like an honest saint compared to them. And Club Zero plays it so deadpan straight-down-the-line with its intentions that it seems perfectly possible to misread the film the same way that many did with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. Verhoeven satirized fascist propaganda by making utterly ridiculous fascist propaganda, and I have the sense that Hausner is up to similar shenanigans here. Because as the children wander off into a painted fantasy land and the parents stop to pose and recreate no less than the “Final Supper” itself it seems as if we (and the film) have fully crossed a rubicon. What goes down must come up, after all. That’s how the saying goes, right?