Jessica Hausner’s ‘Club Zero’ Gets Booed at Cannes

Usually, when a film gets booed at Cannes it becomes a badge of honor, the film must be good. Think of the boo-birds that showed up for films by David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Terrence Malick and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others, over the years.

There were boos at my screening of Jessica Hausner’s “Club Zero,” but, this time, for good reason. This is a film that tries to shock you but fails miserably. In fact, it can be terribly dull at the same time. It’s the worst film of this year’s competition.

Mia Wasikowska plays Ms. Novak, a well-being professor at an English boarding school. She tries to shake up the status quo by incorporating a no-food diet to a set of six students.

She claims that your body doesn’t need that much nutrition to survive, in fact, you can just take a few bites a day. The benefits, according to her, far outweigh the cons. You’ll feel stronger, more focused and, as a bonus, will be fighting climate change.

As you can imagine, the results end up being disastrous. The students start to get yellow patches on their skins, their grades begin to falter, they start having thoughts about a brave new world devoid of the system that chains them.

Much like her last film, 2019’s “Little Joe,” the idea behind “Club Zero” is an interesting one, but the execution is incredibly dry. Hausner is a visually talented filmmaker, but her screenplays stink. She can’t seem to inject much-needed focus into them.

What Hausner means to create here is a provocation. A treatise on the infiltrates groupthink of today’s youth culture. That’s fair enough. But, much like in “Little Joe,” she doesn’t develop her ideas properly and stops short of truly provoking.

On a brighter note, Hausner’s use of matching color and costume is again visually arresting in this film, but it only enhances the superficial nature of the whole thing. [D]