"John Wick" star
Keanu Reeves has been confirmed for two-time Palme d'Or winner
Ruben Ostlund's (
"Triangle of Sadness") second English-language film
"The Entertainment System is Down", and he will be joined by
Kirsten Dunst (
"Civil War") and
Daniel Bruhl (
"Rush").
The film is set on a long-haul flight where the entertainment system fails, and the passengers are forced to face the horror of being bored. Östlund bought a retired Boeing 747 for the project, with the plane set to be used full scale for the shoot in a studio. Filming is expected to begin in early 2025.
The Swedish filmmaker was inspired by a social psychological study at Virginia University called
"The Challenge Of The Disengaged Mind", which found that participants did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think. To take the experiment one step further, the researchers added a twist: With the touch of a button, the test subjects could, if desired, give themselves a harmless but very painful electric shock. It turned out that a quarter of all women and two-thirds of all men chose to press the button. One man even found being alone with his thoughts so unbearable that, during the 15 minutes, he gave himself 190 electric shocks.
The film will be a Swedish-German-French co-production, and will reunite the director with producer
Erik Hemmendorff of Plattform Produktion and producer
Philippe Bober from Paris-based Coproduction Office, which is also handling world sales.
