Metacritic reviews

Taken as a bone-dry satirical comedy, this would be a cruelly glib treatment of material sensitive enough to merit a trigger warning in bright yellow prior to the opening credits. But this agonizing tour through private agony deserves to be taken more seriously than that.

What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.

Riddled with uncomfortable dialogue, audacious sequences, and a piercing score, Club Zero has all the ingredients to become a future cult classic. It’s for a great reason, too. The film contains a terrifying yet wonderful performance from Wasikowska, it includes brilliant commentary on the dangers of following blindly, and it provides great entertainment.

Quirky and uncomfortable but hard to turn away from, Club Zero is reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, especially because it has a tone of below-average existence masked in contemporary and forward-thinking superficialities.

It looks terrific – as always Hausner’s use of colour and costume is striking and eloquent – but this is a thinly-written picture that operates on a largely superficial level.

While the group of actors who play the students offer strong performances, particularly Luke Barker, Ksenia Devriendt, and Florence Baker, Hausner's meandering feature eventually concludes without a real ending.

It’s always been hard not to admire Hausner’s audacity, but this time around the boldness of her storytelling finally spills into trollish provocation.

Club Zero is less a cautionary tale about eating disorders than a satire on environmental anxieties, extreme activism, and the sometimes-competitive nature of those who get swept up in it. That’s a tasty premise, but Hausner’s take is frankly a cynical one and, much like the plate of vomit that dominated headlines after the film’s premiere last week in Cannes, it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.

Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption.

Teenage idealism curdling into cult-like insanity is a punchy, timely subject. But it’s hard to discern what Hauser and her regular co-writer Géraldine Bajard actually want to do with it, or how much sympathy their film has for Miss Novak’s follower-victims.