A version of this article was first published on May 22 2015

Does the Cannes Film Festival have a serious boos problem, and is it time to stage an intervention? The question blew up with fresh fury this year when Personal Shopper, the new film from Olivier Assayas and starring Kristen Stewart, was met by a chorus of hoots and groans at its first press screening.

Sitting in the audience, I knew that the film would be booed around five minutes into it – not because it’s bad, but because after a few years on the circuit, you get a sense for the kind of provocations that tend to rub a festival audience up the wrong way. Often, they’re the very same things that end up winning the film a dedicated fan-base in the long term. In the case of Assayas’s film, one is its un-ironic commitment to the fact that Stewart’s character – a celebrity’s personal assistant with tragedy in her recent past – is actually, seriously, in communion with the dead.

“It’s extremely difficult to find a portal into the spirit world,” she announces in an early scene, as flatly as if she was talking about a turn-off on the M1 – and you could hear sharp intakes of breath around the auditorium, as people wondered if they were the butt of some kind of deadpan joke on Assayas’s part. Sure enough, a little under two hours later, they expressed their disapproval.