Full Phil Review: Stewart and Harrelson in Paris

Quentin Dupieux has built a career out of movies that probably shouldn’t work — a killer tire, a man who becomes his own deerskin jacket — and his latest, Full Phil, arrives at Cannes 2026 with a similarly absurd premise: a father whose stomach mysteriously swells every time his daughter eats. It’s the kind of idea that sounds like vintage Dupieux on paper. On screen, the results are more complicated.

Kristen Stewart plays Madeleine Doom, a thirty-something with an almost competitive relationship with room service, who has reluctantly agreed to accompany her nearly sixty-year-old father Philip (Woody Harrelson) on a supposed reconciliation trip to Paris. Philip has organized the whole thing. Madeleine, for her part, mostly just wants to eat. And eat. And eat — gnawing meat off the bone, working through platter after cloche-covered platter while watching a scratchy 1950s creature feature on a portable DVD player, barely acknowledging that her father is in the room, let alone that he flew them both to Paris to fix something between them.

The film-within-a-film is one of Full Phil‘s genuine pleasures. Emma Mackey plays a screaming damsel fleeing a humanoid fish monster, while Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim — longtime Dupieux collaborators — portray a pair of mad scientists investigating the creature with the kind of deadpan commitment that makes every line reading feel like a small event. More than one critic has noted that when Heidecker and Wareheim disappear from the screen for a stretch, you feel their absence. The B-movie parody is juvenile and silly and exactly right, landing somewhere between Creature from the Black Lagoon and a Troma production scripted by Samuel Beckett.

Stewart Commits Fully — Harrelson Less So

Stewart is the clear standout. For someone whose elegance and Chanel-clad public image have been cultural obsessions since Twilight, there’s something almost gleefully subversive about watching her hold a greasy steak with both hands and tear into it. She delivers Madeleine’s bratty, withering one-liners with obvious relish — when Philip tries to process their estrangement through therapy-speak, she shuts it down as “regurgitates all your shrink’s bullshit,” a choice of words that’s telling. She’s having fun, and that fun is contagious. Stewart, who earned extraordinary notices last year for The Chronology of Water, proves she can do full sicko comedy just as convincingly.

Harrelson is a trickier case. Philip is written as a prissy, hygiene-obsessed American abroad — so consumed by shame over a clogged toilet (Madeleine’s fault, not his) that he refuses to call maintenance, convinced the staff will think it’s his. It’s a funny setup. But critics note that once you clock what Harrelson is doing, there isn’t much more to discover. He leans on the same befuddled, flustered register throughout, and the repetition dulls the edge.

The physical gag — Philip’s belly distending further with every meal Madeleine consumes — eventually gestures toward something genuinely poignant about late parenthood, the way a father might absorb his adult child’s emotional weight the same way he once bore her physical needs. Fans of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life may clock uncomfortable echoes of Mr. Creosote by the time Philip looks, per one review, like he’s about to give birth to twins. But the film takes its time getting there, and the path is lined with dialogue that circles back on itself without deepening.

Dupieux’s Paris, Seen From the Inside of a Hotel Suite

Dupieux — who serves as his own cinematographer, as always — shoots the hotel suite in bright, luxurious light that makes Philip’s rigid territorial lines (his side, her side) all the funnier. Outside, Paris is apparently on fire: a burning car in the background while Philip smokes a cigarette, a Molotov cocktail hitting a taxi they’re riding to dinner, riot police beating protesters with batons. Neither of them really notices, or cares. It’s potentially the film’s sharpest joke — a wry, pointed observation about the insularity of American tourists abroad — but Dupieux doesn’t push it hard enough to land with real force. It stays in the background, like the protests themselves.

Charlotte Le Bon, recognizable from The White Lotus, gets some of the film’s biggest laughs as Lucie, a hotel employee who becomes convinced Philip is a danger to his daughter and appoints herself his shadow. It’s a running gag that escalates with quiet absurdist logic, and Le Bon plays it with a straight-faced commitment that suits the material perfectly.

The electronic score by German EDM producer Siriusmo (Moritz Friedrich) does real work here — a spooky, rumbling undercurrent that keeps the film feeling stranger and more atmospheric than its thin script sometimes earns. It’s the kind of score that makes you feel like something weirder is happening than actually is, which is either a credit to the music or a mild indictment of the movie.

Where It Lands

The critical consensus shaking out of Cannes is that Full Phil is minor Dupieux — not a disaster, not a revelation. At 78 minutes it still manages to feel overstretched, a first draft of something that, with more pressure applied to its themes, could have been genuinely affecting. The final minutes do arrive at something emotionally real between Stewart and Harrelson, a shared history and a complicated love that the preceding hour only hints at. But getting there requires patience with a lot of wheel-spinning.

What’s not in question is that this is Dupieux’s most starry cast yet, and that Stewart in particular is doing something worth watching — a rare full-comedy performance from an actress who usually operates in more guarded registers. Whether that’s enough to justify the trip to Paris depends entirely on how much you enjoy watching someone eat steak for 78 minutes.

Full Phil is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Dupieux also has a second Cannes 2026 project: the animated film Vertiginous, closing out the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.