• Full Phil premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
• Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson play an estranged daughter and father on a rocky trip to Paris.
• The film marks Dupieux’s return to working with American actors for the first time since Wrong Cops in 2013.
• Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim appear in a black-and-white creature feature playing inside the movie.
• Critics are divided — Stewart earns near-universal praise, but the film itself lands as minor, repetitive Dupieux.

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.

The post Full Phil Review: Stewart and Harrelson in Paris appeared first on Cream.

• Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson’s new film Full Phil premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival on May 17
• The absurd father-daughter comedy earned a five-minute standing ovation despite a mixed audience reaction
• Director Quentin Dupieux returns to Cannes after opening the 2024 festival with The Second Act
• Stewart danced, waved, and pulled faces during the ovation, trying to redirect attention to her co-stars
• The cast also includes Emma Mackey, Charlotte Le Bon, Tim Heidecker, and Eric Wareheim

Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson brought their new movie to the Palais — and the Palais gave it right back. Full Phil, the absurdist father-daughter comedy from French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, had its world premiere at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, May 17, and walked away with a five-minute standing ovation — even if the film itself left the crowd a little divided.

The midnight screening drew a full house that was rowdy and ready from the start. Before the film even rolled, Dupieux and his cast — including Emma Mackey, whose previous film Ella McCay was a massive hit in France, and Charlotte Le Bon — were met with loud applause just walking out. The energy in the room was high. And then the movie played.

The surreal comedy pulled laughs throughout, but according to reports from inside the Palais, ultimately seemed to fall a little flat. When the credits rolled, the applause was polite. But when the lights came up and the cast appeared, fans got to their feet — and stayed there for five full minutes.

Stewart, never one to just stand and soak it in, made the moment her own. She pulled faces at the camera, waved up to the balcony, and at one point started dancing in place — all while visibly trying to steer the spotlight toward her co-stars. Very her.

What Full Phil Is Actually About

In the film, Stewart and Harrelson play Madeleine and Philip Doom — a daughter and her wealthy American business magnate father who travel to Paris in an attempt to reconnect. What gets in the way? French cuisine, a 1950s horror film, and a nosy hotel employee. Classic Dupieux territory: a simple premise that quietly goes completely sideways.

The full cast also includes Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, rounding out what is a distinctly offbeat ensemble for a distinctly offbeat filmmaker.

Earlier in the day, the whole crew — Stewart, Harrelson, Mackey, Le Bon, Heidecker, Wareheim, and Dupieux — stepped out for a photocall at the Palais des Festivals, both stars in sunglasses and clearly in good spirits. On the red carpet that evening, Stewart wore Chanel, Harrelson wore Celine, and Mackey stepped out in a custom Louis Vuitton gown.

Why Stewart Wanted This Role So Badly

Stewart has been open about the fact that working with Dupieux was something she’d been chasing. In an interview with Variety ahead of the festival, she didn’t hold back on the admiration.

“I love his movies. They just don’t look or feel like anyone else’s, and those are the types of directors that actors are so lucky to be able to follow,” she said. “He holds the camera at all times. You are with him, connected completely. He knows how he’s going to edit it by the end of the day. If he’s missing a shot, he gets it. He’s beyond an auteur, he’s like a mastermind.”

For Dupieux, this is a return to Cannes after opening the 2024 festival with The Second Act. For Stewart, it’s her second consecutive year on the Croisette — last year she was here as a director, premiering The Chronology of Water, her debut behind the camera, starring Imogen Poots as a swimmer navigating addiction. That film received critical acclaim and cemented her reputation as a serious filmmaker, not just a serious actor.

And she’s not slowing down. Stewart is also set to portray Sally Ride — the first American woman in space — in The Challenger, an upcoming Prime Video limited series inspired by Meredith E. Bagby’s book The New Guys. It’ll mark her first regular TV series role.

Mixed reactions or not, a five-minute standing ovation at Cannes is still a five-minute standing ovation. And watching Kristen Stewart dance through it like she’s embarrassed and delighted in equal measure? That part wasn’t mixed at all.

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