The screaming young woman (Emma Mackey), fleeing through the shin-high muddy water, keeps turning around. However, probably less to see whether the swamp monster has already come closer. Instead, the actress has to make sure that she doesn’t run too fast so that the guy in the rubber costume can catch up. “Full Phil” by Quentin Dupieux begins as a black-and-white parody of 1950s monster films like “The Amazon Terror.” But the B-movie is just a film within a film that Madeleine (Kristen Stewart) watches on a portable DVD player (old school!) in her Paris suite – and to which she returns again and again over the next hour. Her estranged father Philip Doom (Woody Harrelson), a wealthy businessman, booked the trip to reconnect with his daughter.
So far, however, things are not going so well. Even though her part of the suite has a private bathroom, she used her father’s toilet – and it’s now blocked. Of course you could just call room service, but that’s too embarrassing for Philip. A harmless argument ensues, but a few loud words and a thrown tray call the hotel staff into action. The floor waitress Lucie (Charlotte Le Bon) refuses to leave the room – she has a bad feeling and would rather be on the safe side. Any complaints about the situation fall flat: Lucie arrested a pedophile last month, which is why the staff has blindly trusted her instincts ever since. Philip squirms under the constant observation and Madeleine stuffs herself with sheer quantities of food. But while his daughter just can’t seem to get enough, Philip soon finds himself unable to zip up his pants – and mass civil war-like protests are raging outside on the streets…
Woody Harrelson fights, Kristen Stewart eats – and the audience has the best time!
Philip certainly wasn’t the best dad, but he didn’t deserve that. Woody Harrelson (“Triangle Of Sadness”) plays the well-intentioned but communicatively overwhelmed father in a completely unpretentious manner, probably the poorest sausage in the world. You almost want to hold him in your arms and feed him gruel – if he wasn’t already on the verge of bursting. Speaking of sausages: Kristen Stewart (“Love Lies Bleeding”) also eats two double hot dogs in the 78 minutes that fly by. There are also mountains of tarts, fries, cakes and a very impressive leg of lamb – all without cutlery, just your fingers, even the mashed potatoes.
Whatever her fee for “Full Phil” may have been (and she probably makes a special price for such special projects anyway): if she had uploaded the scenes as a mukbang video to OnlyFans instead, she would certainly have shattered all existing earnings records there. The monster horror portion with the comedian duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (“Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie”) runs out of steam a little when the parody switches from “The Terror of the Amazon” to “Frankenstein”. But the mercilessly absurd hotel room activity that clearly makes up the majority of “Full Phil” is not only painfully hilarious, but also surprisingly touching in a completely twisted way.
Strokes of genius like on an assembly line
The electronic musician Quentin Dupieux, who was once world-famous under the stage name Mr. Oizo, now releases up to three films a year – and almost every one of them has such a unique concept that most filmmakers probably never manage to achieve once in their career. This ranges from telepathically murdering car tires (“Rubber”) to giant flies in the trunk (“A fly rarely comes alone”). But “Full Phil” falls more into the category of his film “Unbelievable but True,” in which a long-married couple discovers a hole in the basement that catapults you twelve hours into the future, but at the same time makes you three days younger – a fantastic experimental setup in which absurd comedy meets bitter tragedy.
Conclusion: You can only be amazed at the speed with which “Rubber” mastermind Quentin Dupieux brings one crazy, brilliant idea after another onto the screen – and in Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson he has found two accomplices who you can tell were REALLY, REALLY excited about the project. If you were mean, you could point out that “Full Phil” is actually just a famous Monty Python sketch blown up to feature length – but that would be far too short-sighted. There is too much heartwarming wisdom between the terrifically entertaining madness.
We saw “Full Phil” at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere as a midnight film.