According to The Guardian, the applause following Pillion’s screening at last year’s Cannes Film Festival “lasted several minutes, with the inevitable awkwardness of seeming dutiful”. The Alexander Skarsgård film is the norm, not the exception. In 2024, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis reportedly got seven callous-inducing minutes of standing ovation. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth managed to elicit a record-breaking 22 mins in 2006. And Joachim Trier’s 2025 follow-up to The Worst Person In The World rivalled that, with the ovation for his latest film clocking in at almost 20 minutes. GQ has said in the past that, when it comes to applause at Cannes, “anything five minutes or less is a tepid – or worse – appraisal”. But how did this palm prison get built, and what is its purpose? Alexander Skarsgard in Cannes 2025 Cannes’ standing ovations are part of an exhausting-sounding hierarchy According to The Atlantic (who, like The Guardian, call the custom “awkward”), clapping at Cannes is part of the spectacle. At the French festival in particular, the length and enthusiasm of …