Didn't know they allowed student films to compete for the Palme d'Or

Club Zero comes from Austrian director Jessica Hausner and stars Mia Wasikowska as Miss Novak, a new addition to the staff of an international boarding school who teaches a ´conscious eating class´ that leads to the aforementioned Club Zero, in which eating less is the mantra above all else.

Now I really don’t want to waste more of your or my time with this movie and mention at the top of this review, that Club Zero is trash.

It fails on every level imaginable and certainly didn’t deserve to be a part of this year’s competition at Cannes. It resembles a regurgitated, thrown-up, abandoned Wes Anderson look-a-like project with stilted, over-the-top characters that never get anywhere even if the movie seems convinced of its own self-importance.

The performances are rough to watch, if this is intentional or not isn’t even relevant, but I couldn’t stand any of it. The repetition of similar story beats and sets got tiring and resembled a film student production.

Even if you cut this movie in half or make it a 30-minute short, you’d still have an abundance of problems at hand, but at least you’d have wasted less of your time for this story that ultimately never really gets anywhere interesting.

A premise like this can be quite captivating and thought-provoking, just look at the German film Die Welle, which captured this notion of indoctrinating teens with toxic and harmful ideologies masterfully.