The man who saw the future: the legacy of cultural theorist Mark Fisher

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Touching on everything from late-stage capitalism to Adele, the work of the late writer is proving increasingly influential. Now a documentary on him is looking to live up to his ideals Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published in 2009 to critical silence. Journalists and academics initially dismissed Mark Fisher’s book, ignoring the cultural theorist’s requests for coverage and interviews, and even the then owner of his publisher, Zer0 Books, lamented that it was unmarketable. Fisher, also prone to self-doubt, questioned the relevance of his thesis and the gravitas of his personal approach after attempting, and failing, to write a traditional systematic work of theory. As of December 2025, more than 250,000 English-language versions of Capitalist Realism have been sold, with translations available in Spanish, Italian, Arabic Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hebrew, Korean and Danish. Fisher, unassumingly, had aspired to sell a few hundred. Revered for...
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Club Zero review – not much to chew on in this baffling non-satire

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Jessica Hausner’s film, which avoids spelling out its obvious subject, focuses on a group of schoolgirls encouraged to live without food

Jessica Hausner is the Austrian director whose elegant, refrigerated style has made her a Cannes favourite and her 2009 film Lourdes, about the ordinary world of miracles, is a 21st-century classic. But her recent move to English-language movies has resulted in some nebulous work in the shape of her 2019 picture Little Joe, and so it has proved again with this exasperating and baffling movie.

Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption. The “trigger warning” at the beginning of the film about these issues is fatuous, whether intended ironically or not. The deadpan mannerisms are glib, the line readings are torpid in the wrong way and the laborious drama leads us round and round and round like an Escher staircase. But it is certainly well shot by Martin Gschlacht and punctiliously designed by Beck Rainford.

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