Club Zero Needs a Little More Meat on Its Bones

“Conscious eating” is the idea that you should be aware of everything you’re consuming. You really take the time to contemplate the food on your plate, how it got there, and the ethical ramifications of how it was created. On a purely surface level, there’s something worthwhile in consciously eating. With the way the world has modernized, there’s a strong disconnect between consumers and where the food originates. Even going beyond the ethical, social, and moral considerations that go into lifestyles like veganism and vegetarianism, from a very baseline standpoint, we should be conscious of our food. It’s this viewpoint that many of the characters of Club Zero start with.

Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska of Alice in Wonderland) is a new teacher at a prestigious international school in Australia. She has been hired to teach a class on conscious eating. Her students are primarily interested because they’re environmentally-minded or they want to improve their eating habits for health reasons. They’re starting from a fairly neutral point. This includes Ben (Samuel D. Anderson), the only student who hasn’t sipped a tiny bit of the Kool-Aid and is only in the class to improve his PSAT scores. He may not have signed up for altruistic reasons, but he doesn’t find anything inherently wrong with being conscious about food. As one can imagine, it doesn’t take much for this class to delve into something darker as Club Zero unfolds.

“It frightens people when you question their truth,” Miss Novak says. Once she gets her students to buy into the idea of conscious eating, she reveals that she is part of a larger group of people who have fully foregone the process of eating. Miss Novak believes this is the only ethical way to move forward, and once the students have bought in enough, encourages them to follow suit. Humans only eat because society tells them to. It’s a way to contribute to consumerism. As far as Miss Novak is concerned, there’s no need for humans to eat.

Miss Novak’s class quickly devolves into a cult. It’s not a big leap, and these students are particularly primed to follow her off the cliff. They signed up for the class because they were looking for answers, for an adult to provide them with a path for their future that would make sense of the worries they have about the state of the world. The students have valid, terrifying concerns. They’re growing up in a time when they’re constantly being reminded of how poorly our planet has been cared for. Everyone worries about the future, but the young people of today have very real reasons to be concerned.

That’s the key to a functional cult; to start small, to make sense of a problem. To provide an answer that speaks to a deeply held concern, fear, or self-conscious place. Club Zero takes the very real concerns of young people and shows what can happen when that fear is exploited. Beyond the concerns with the environment, body image seems to transcend generations and has only gotten worse with the onslaught of social media. It’s no wonder that Miss Novak can so easily wrap these kids around her finger and become powerful in their eyes. She gives the students something they’re desperately craving: autonomy, freedom, and respect. The school these students are attending is a boarding school, and their parents are less than interested in their lives. Fred’s (Luke Barker) parents are abroad and treat the Skype calls as torturous, having no interest in what Fred is doing at school. He’s a moth to Miss Novak’s flame.

Club Zero looks to have taken a few pages from Wes Anderson’s colorful, pastel book. The film doesn’t have the same zippy camerawork or symmetrical style as most of Anderson’s works, but Club Zero’s retro-futuristic production design speaks to the look of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Club Zero has adopted a stilted, awkward speech pattern for its characters that somehow feels natural, despite its strange cadence. The stilted nature also comes through in the camera work, as it’s not particularly mobile. The movement of the camera is all in the zooms, forever pushing closer and closer to the character on the screen. It feels stifling, because who would want to exist under Miss Novak’s gaze for that long?

For all the stilted nature of the dialogue and the camera work, it’s unfortunate that Club Zero loses some of its momentum as it reaches its conclusion. For all its lofty ideas about body image, environmentalism, and consumerism, Club Zero is left feeling a little empty. The film has created such an interesting world where our current fears have been taken to an extreme, that you almost wish it had widened its scope beyond the school. There’s brief mentions of others like Miss Novak who are taking things to an even bigger extreme, and the film would’ve benefitted from expanding and exploring those stories.

Club Zero is an interesting exercise in restraint, both in the eating habits it encourages for its characters and in its production. However, the world that the film built is far too intriguing to leave on the cutting room floor. There is restraint while also feeling full, but Club Zero is unable to reach that duality.