At The Movies: Club Zero serves up food for thought, Nyad’s actresses go the distance

Club Zero (NC16)

104 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars

The story: A nutritionist is recruited to an elite British boarding school and begins indoctrinating her students in an extreme regimen of “conscious eating”.

Mia Wasikowska stars as new faculty member Miss Novak in the blackly comic Club Zero. “Conscious eating”, per her instructions, starts with dicing the food, and then taking a deep breath before slowly, deliberately masticating each morsel.

It is patently ridiculous.

Her class of five teenagers enrol for reasons varying from health and the environment to optimising self-control.

They eventually graduate to eating nothing. Miss Novak teaches that food is defilement and one can live on just the power of belief.

The wealthy parents are too self-absorbed to notice the physical decline and brainwashing, much less the ominous warning notes in the soundtrack’s drum rhythms.

By the time they call on the headmistress (Sidse Babett Knudsen) to intervene, it is too late – but for what, exactly?

There is no predicting the storylines of Austrian arthouse director Jessica Hausner’s idiosyncratic parables, most famously Lourdes, her 2009 drama of a miracle cure, and the 2019 horror Little Joe, about a genetically engineered plant.

This savage satire on New Age wellness quackeries, with their cult of positivity and mindfulness, also turns into horror with Australian actress Wasikowska’s prim yet baleful presence as Miss Novak.

It is archly deadpan and consistently disquieting even if it never gets very deep into any of its many issues, which further include the susceptibility of emotionally neglected youth. The students surrender easily to their teacher’s manipulation.

“Have faith,” she asks of them. In the movie, and often in life too, these two words are a dangerous invitation to folly.

Hot take: This unsettling tale of dieting disorders serves up food for thought alongside off-kilter comedy.

Nyad (M18)

121 minutes, available on Netflix
3 stars

The story: At age 60, three decades after retiring from endurance swimming, American athlete Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) sets out to achieve a lifelong dream: to front-crawl 180km from Cuba to Florida across open water without a protective shark cage. Based on a true adventure.

Bening, 65, trained in the pool for an entire year and brings to the title role all of her character’s fortitude, self-aggrandising monomania and sun-baked blisters.

Jodie Foster is a very fine 60-year-old herself, co-starring as the best friend-cum-coach Bonnie Stoll.

Adapted from the 2015 memoir Find A Way, the biopic Nyad recounts the epic quest that further involves Rhys Ifans as the rumpled captain of the dedicated team navigating the escort boat.

There are three scuttled attempts over four years, plus multiple near-death setbacks in the form of jellyfish, sharks, inclement weather and hypothermia.

Also par for the course are the triumphant speeches about the human spirit and ageism. Indeed, Nyad does succeed in 2013 at 64, after a heroic 53-hour swim.

The husband-and-wife co-directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi won a 2019 Academy Award for their rock-climbing documentary Free Solo. Extreme athletic feats are their thing.

And yet, Nyad’s expedition here is a boilerplate inspirational sports story only as stirring as it is for being, at the same time, a rarely seen story of mature female friendship. Foster’s even-keeled Stoll is the North Star to the obsessive Nyad, forever trying to out-swim her childhood trauma and fear of mediocrity, and the acting pros are marvellous together in their lived-in warmth, tenderness and exuberant teasing humour.

Hot take: Bening and Foster, the champs that they are, go the distance in a winning bio-drama.