Ruben Östlund took a satirical look at the super-rich and super-elite in the comedy Triangle of Sadness. Now, he is aiming to put a mirror up to the average person’s idle mind. Östlund’s next anticipated film will be The Entertainment System is Down and it was recently reported that Keanu Reeves was in talks to star in the movie. Deadline now confirms that Reeves has officially signed on to do the film, and Kirsten Dunst and Daniel Bruhl have now joined him on that fateful flight.
Östlund says The Entertainment System Is Down is a social satire set on a long-haul flight with a faulty entertainment system. As boredom spreads throughout the cabin, rage starts to overwhelm the passengers. Chaos ensues. The idea for Östlund’s next feature is something he’s been building for years. The filmmaker says he’s been collecting anecdotes to use as inspiration for The Entertainment System Is Down, with several years of material at his disposal. Though it likely involves dark comedy and sharp humor, Reeves’s role remains a mystery.
Discussing the film with Variety last year, Östlund said The Entertainment System Is Down is “a study of how human beings interact in this little laboratory that is a plane” and “will look at how modern human beings are wrecked under these circumstances.” Additionally, Östlund has the hilarious audacity to hope that his new film inspires the biggest walkout in Cannes Film Festival history.
Östlund had taken his inspiration for this concept from a social psychological study at Virginia University that was called “The Challenge Of The Disengaged Mind.” According to Deadline, it was in this experiment where it was observed 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.”