Club Zero

A nutritionist at a British boarding school, Ms Novak (Mia Wasikowska) serenely leads her class into the practice of “conscious eating”: a way to master our appetite for the benefit of health, body image, and the environment. Soon she has half a dozen enthusiastic acolytes. But where she leads them will make Lord of the Flies look like a summer camp… Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s English-language film is at once a satire, a horror film, a black comedy, and a thriller. It’s very much of the moment; a movie about environmental anxiety, cults, body fascism, and a young generation trying to make sense of a world bent on self-destruction.

Supremely audacious and disturbing… channeling some combination of Hitchcock and Cronenberg and Village of the Damned and the Todd Haynes of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, [Hausner] has now made an even more gripping and provocative mind-fuck… It’s part of the film’s harrowingly funny yet deadly sincere design that in the context of current social-political concerns, eating disorders, with their coded patterns of order, could now almost be looked upon as something to strive for.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety