Talk about your cinematic hot potatoes.

“Club Zero” is a drama played out in the soft-spoken tones of self-help speak, a satire on the indulged habits of indulged children of the indulgent rich. It’s about food and the swirl of modern issues surrounding our consumption of it.

Director and co-writer Jessica Hausner’s tale takes in the eating disorders of our “You can never be too rich or too thin” era, the cultural obsession with “health,” and dietary environmentalism as we visit a tony private school that dives into the “conscious eating” fad a tad too seriously.

The film folds “saving the planet” by eating less, anti-consumerism and survivalism into a story of “mindful eating” (the other name for it) run amok.

Mia Wasikowska plays an expert in the field — She has a website! — hired to be a teacher and coach to the first kids at this Euro-prep boarding school that is run, as such schools often are, by rich parents who serve on a board.

Being in tune with the latest “thing” and hearing their fad-hunting kids tell them “Vegan is so OUT” has them track down Miss Novak (Wasikowska) and put her on the faculty. The half-dozen teens who sign up for her first course of meditation, mindfulness and chewing very very slowly mention “weight” issues and health concerns, along with “saving the planet” and the like as their reasons for enrolling.

Miss Novak will be their spirit guide, helping them retrain their bodies to eat less, consider what they eat more and sharpen their minds with practices that she promises will prolong their lives, letting them outlive those outside their circle who are eating themselves into oblivion.

Fred (Luke Barker) is a ballet dance student and a diabetic whose distracted parents are running a help-the-natives project in far-off Ghana. He’s not well enough to endure life there, but he is convinced he can eat or fast his way out of his insulin shots.

Ragna (Florence Baker) is a trampoline gymnast who likes the weight control and mind-“sharpening” virtues of eating less. A lot less. Her weight-obsessed mother (Keeley Forsyth) seems on board with this program, but her impatient father (Lukas Turtur) rages at his perhaps bulemic wife and a daughter who seems determined to go down the same path, sanctioned by her school.

And Ben (Samuel D Anderson) is a “brilliant” student, son of a single mom (Amanda Lawrence) who cooks and feeds him in ways that belie his skinny frame. He will be a hard one to sell on this business of reducing your diet to a single potato wedge, carefully carved and consumed from one’s otherwise empty cafeteria plate.

Waskiwska, feigning a vague pan-European accent, makes a terrific cult leader in the Born Again/True Believer mold.

“Someone who does not eat is not tolerated,” she warns her half dozen students, in between chants, meditations and lectures about “Autophagy,” everything the body “doesn’t need” in terms of meals.

Society will push back, but they must stay the course, she says. Especially if they want to attain the enlightenment of “Club Zero.”

We hear Miss Novak flatter her disciples, BS her headmistress/boss (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and pray — for want of a better word — to her belief system in the hope that she can be worthy of it.

And we hear the students, a tighter-and-tighter-knit-circle, debate the evils of “the food industry,” the dietary “trash” it produces (High fructose corn syrup? Take a bow.) and the “carbon emissions” reduction that could result in everybody everywhere eating more mindfully and eating less.

It’s all treated with a dry seriousness — the kids taking their teaching as a jumping-off point, their teacher welcoming that and rich, self-involved and distracted parents not noticing their kids are seeming thinner and more gaunt with each encounter.

The school’s administration and key parents on the board seem most intent on patting themselves on the back for being quickest to jump on a new trend.

But every false prophet has a fatal flaw. “Club Zero” ponders the notion that our current culture might not accept evidence to that effect, that political correctness might get in the way of common sense and that kids — especially those self-starving their way to Nirvana — might not be as easily de-programmed as they were programmed.

The dry nature of the material and how it is treated limit the drama in this subject and flattened-out performances lower its entertainment value. But it’s daring, any way you slice that single potato wedge you’re having for lunch.

Being “mindful” can be a good thing to bring to all corners of your life. It’s just that one can never be too careful with who to accept as your guide to that mental state, and with how far to take its practice.

Rating: unrated, very disturbing themes

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Florence Baker, Samuel D Anderson, Luke Barker, Gwen Currant, Amanda Lawrence, Keeley Forsyth and Lukas Turtur

Credits: Directed by Jessica Hausner, scripted by Jessica Hausner and Géraldine Bajard. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:50