The Plague review – water polo camp turns into tween hellscape with impressive stylistic bite

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With Fincher-like intent, director Charlie Polinger scopes out concealed psychological depths in a debut that sees the laws of the jungle play out Set at a boy’s water polo training camp in the summer of 2003, Charlie Polinger’s debut feature plunges beneath the waterline to scope out concealed psychological depths. It may not be news that these kids operate in a brutal, animal-like hierarchy driven by braggadocio, bullying, hazing and gaslighting – but from the stunning initial submerged shot of a pool glittering like a starfield, Polinger brings impressive stylistic bite to this tween hellscape: the kind of trenchant intent you might associate with David Fincher. Latecomer Ben (Everett Blunck) is thrown in at the deep end when he arrives. Desperate to ingratiate himself with the cool crowd lorded over by the impish Jake (Kayo Martin), he aims to avoid the pariah status of house lummox Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), who is supposedly afflicted with a (made-up) disease the brats dub “the pla...
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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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