Hausner’s film about food ends up being a bit of a suet pudding. There’s a lot of ideas in there, but they never seem to settle into a coherent narrative. It could be subtitled Five go Mad for Fasting. Charismatic teacher, Ms Novak, played with a fierce lack of emotion by Mia Wasikowska comes to a private school to teach a class about conscious eating. What is conscious eating? It’s a process of moderating your food intake to an absolute minimum, for the good of your body and the planet. A select group of five are later initiated by Ms Novak, into Club Zero - which is when you stop eating altogether. The kids embrace this as an attack against the system and their parents - it’s essentially a teenage rebellion. The kids become wanner, their skin touched by a sulphuric yellow, as they gradually wither away, and head towards an entirely enigmatic fate, in between offering their parents diatribes on how the consumption of food only serves to fortify the capitalist system. It’s all very po-faced, reminiscent of mid-period Godard or Lanthimos, but the ideas seem to hover at the edge of the screen, chomping at the bit to be allowed in. There are the occasional gross-out moments which are stitched into the narrative, obvious calling-cards, but these moments have the feel of clunky necessity in a script which has been boiled to within an inch of its life.
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