Club Zero review — outlandish food satire is hard to swallow
★★★☆☆
People take the mickey out of trigger warnings but the one at the start of Jessica Hausner’s outlandish satire is probably worth heeding. It promises incidents of eating disorders and coercive control, and boy, do we get them. The Austrian writer-director’s film tells the story of a teacher, played by Mia Wasikowska, who persuades her pupils that eating is bad for them. It also takes swipes at cults, post-truthers, private education and religious radicalisation, and taps into that ancient Pied Piper fear of losing one’s child to a charismatic interloper.
That’s a lot to digest, and some viewers, like the kids at their mealtimes, will simply refuse to swallow it. Especially given the declarative way in which the actors deliver their lines, as they
