We suspected Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund was going to bring “The Entertainment System Is Down” to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Östlund is now saying, hold on just a sec …
“We’re in the editing process now. It’s always completely crazy, hectic, but at the end of February we’re going to decide if we go for Cannes this year, or for 2027,” the two-time Palme d’Or winner told audiences at Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival on Thursday (via Screen). The film is undergoing a lengthy post-production process, having wrapped its 76-day Budapest shoot in April 2025.
“The Entertainment System Is Down” stars Kirsten Dunst, Daniel Brühl, Keanu Reeves, Nicholas Braun, Samantha Morton and Tobias Menzies. After a competitive bidding war, A24 acquired the film in 2024.
Östlund decided to buy a retired Boeing 747, which is being used as the main set for the film. The story takes place on a long-haul flight whose entertainment system loses power as passengers become “modern human beings that have to deal with boredom and their own thoughts.”
Östlund, a filmmaker who frowns upon subtlety—and I don’t necessarily mean that as a bad thing—clearly has a vision for his next film, and it involves Reeves, Dunst and Brühl serving as his guinea pigs.
In preparing the film, Östlund is said to have been inspired by a social psychology study at the University of Virginia called “The Challenge of the Disengaged Mind.” The experiment found that participants did not enjoy spending six to 15 minutes alone in a room with nothing to do but think.
Östlund plans to include a scene in which a young boy asks to borrow his older brother’s iPad and is told he has to wait five minutes. “And then I want to challenge the audience,” Östlund teases. “You stay with the kid in real time. And he’s looking in the catalog, putting it back, and the restlessness is coming. So he asks his mother, ‘How much do we have left?’ And she says, ‘Well, now it’s four minutes and 45 seconds, you have to calm down.’”
When the audience starts to realize that this is a real-time shot, I think a lot of people are going to be very, very frustrated. I want to create history.
Östlund has previously stated that with this film he wants to cause the most walkouts in Cannes history, arguing that it will be “more provocative than any violent, any disturbing content.”
It must be great being Östlund: he’s about to turn 52 and already has two Palme d’Or wins to his name (“The Square” and “Triangle of Sadness”), and two years ago completed a stint as jury president for the 76th Cannes Film Festival.