Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero: Starving for Meaning
“The old world is dying, the new one struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
— Antonio Gramsci
There’s a particular nausea that comes with living in the 21st century. It isn’t caused by hunger, but by its opposite; overabundance. After the industrial revolution flooded the world with material goods, some of humanity found itself no longer struggling for survival, but for meaning. This existential vacuum, fed by a culture of hyper-consumption and endless information, has left our generation yearning for something real. This is the world Jessica Hausner‘s Club Zero dares to confront.
It’s no surprise the film received harsh criticism. It’s not an easy watch – and not because of its dark subject matter, but because it holds up a mirror to a reality many of us would rather ignore: Our society has gone morally bankrupt.
The story unfolds in an elite European boarding school, an environment suffocating in its sterility. Its students are the children of the privileged but emotionally absent. Fred’s parents abandoned him to travel the world in pursuit of personal fulfillment. Ragna’s parents, hipster intellectuals, are too self-absorbed to parent her properly. Elsa’s parents smother her with material excess, hoping luxury can replace genuine love. Only the working-class mother seems to truly care for her child, harsh commentary on the myth of meritocratic parenting.
These children are starving, not for food, but for meaning, attention, and purpose. They are desperate for guidance, vulnerable to any ideology that promises to soothe their existential hunger. Enter Ms. Novak, the film’s twisted antagonist, a self-proclaimed prophet cloaked in the language of modern “wokeness.”
The Cult of the Good
Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska) is an educator turned predator, offering the students not knowledge but an identity. She preaches “conscious eating”, abstaining from food in the name of environmental sustainability. Her ideology feeds on the children’s vulnerability and need for validation. They crave meaning; she offers a purpose. They hunger for attention; she becomes their affectionate parent.
Ms. Novak’s rhetoric sounds disturbingly familiar. Her doctrine is filled with the polished, performative moralism we see in real-life. Her philosophy of “conscious eating” isn’t just an abstract belief system; it’s tied to a product she’s selling: her own brand of tea. Ms. Novak doesn’t just preach self-denial for the environment; she profits from it. Her tea is a a symbol of purity, while masking her true motives.
This mirrors the reality of consumer culture, where influencers, self-help coaches, and wellness gurus promote ideologies that conveniently align with products they sell. Consider the rise of “clean living” trends, which often conflate spiritual or moral worth with consumer choices. Ms. Novak’s spiritual starvation is literal. The children, driven by a desire to “be good,” waste away under her command. They surrendered their bodies because their souls were already starving. The horrifying implication is clear: when meaning itself becomes a commodity, belief can kill.
The film’s conclusion is as haunting as it is inevitable. The children die, consumed not by hunger but by the lie that meaning can be found through total self-denial. In the film’s final act, even after the children have passed, Ms. Novak’s ideology persists, like a parasite that can’t be killed. The lie continues because it satisfies a deeper hunger; the hunger for certainty, identity, and simplicity in a chaotic world.
This struck a deep chord with me. Living in this fractured, post-truth era, I have felt the seductive pull of ideologies that promise prepackaged meaning. I’ve seen otherwise thoughtful, reasonable people fall into intellectual traps where every question has a ready-made answer, where the complexities of life are flattened into simple, moral binaries.
Ironically, this seemingly progressive type of thinking falls in line with conservative frameworks of good versus evil. Incredibly tempting just for a moment’s relief from the endless search for purpose.
The metaphor of hunger in Club Zero is tragically precise: the hunger of the soul, the existential longing for meaning, is “fulfilled” by literal starvation. It’s the ultimate perversion of a spiritual quest. The children reject food to nourish their empty selves, becoming blank vessels for Ms. Novak’s ideology.
Starving for Control
By using the analogy of food and eating to explore the power of ideology, Hausner taps into something primal and universal. Food is an undeniable necessity for survival , a fact so self-evident that it seems impossible to dispute. Yet, in Club Zero, Ms. Novak convinces her students to believe the opposite: that they don’t need food at all.
This manipulation works because not eating becomes more than just abstinence, it’s transformed into an act of self-control. In a chaotic world where young people feel increasingly powerless over their lives, bodies become the last frontier of personal autonomy. Restricting food becomes an addictive display of control, a rebellion against a reality that feels unchangeable.
This mirrors Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopower” from The History of Sexuality, where institutions exert control over individuals through their bodies. In modern society, the “body project” managing health, appearance, and fitness, is often marketed as self-empowerment, but in reality, it’s another form of control sold back to us through products, diets, and routines.
Antonio Gramsci’s quote about the birth of a new world comes to mind again. The children in Club Zero are abandoned by a generation that promised them everything but delivered isolation, anxiety, and existential despair. Their hunger is a product of a world that cannot feed them, and Ms. Novak is the monster born from that hunger, a twisted response to a collapsing social contract.
Hausner dares to show us what happens when belief becomes a weapon, when progress becomes dogma, and when the pursuit of “goodness” becomes predatory. She exposes how a morally bankrupt society breeds new prophets who exploit the vulnerable under the guise of virtue.
Club Zero is uncomfortable, confrontational, and necessary. Hausner doesn’t create art to please; she creates art to provoke. In a world that shies away from uncomfortable truths, she charges headfirst into the void, dragging us with her. She reminds us that progress cannot come without facing the monstrous parts of ourselves; the lies we believe, the ideologies we consume, and the hunger we try to silence.
It’s art like this – audacious, reflective and fearless – that stays with you. Club Zero spoke to me in a way few films have in recent years. It validated feelings I thought were mine alone and held them up for the world to see.
In a society desperate to escape the weight of meaning, Club Zero makes it clear: if we refuse to face our hunger, it will consume us.
*
Chama Al Houari (f. 2002) is an aspiring filmmaker from Morocco. She is currently living in Oslo, and is passionate about film history and how movies reflects the world.