{"id":448635,"date":"2026-05-19T01:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T01:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/448635\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T01:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T01:36:08","slug":"full-phil-review-is-it-quentin-dupieuxs-crossover-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/448635\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Full Phil’ Review: Is It Quentin Dupieux’s Crossover Movie?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux<\/a>, director of the midnight cult movie \u201cRubber\u201d (about a homicidal car tire) and the ticklishly perverse \u201cDeerskin\u201d (in which Jean Dujardin played a lonely loon obsessed with a vintage fringed suede jacket), is a dada prankster whose work inspires a different sense of anticipation from that of almost any other filmmaker. When you go into a Quentin Dupieux film, it\u2019s with the thought, \u201cWTF is he going to pull this time?\u201d His movies are goofs, larks, stunts, knowingly arch bizarro-world riffs. And I was especially curious about \u201cFull Phil<\/a>,\u201d because it combines Dupieux\u2019s French surrealist impishness with the American star power of Kristen Stewart<\/a> and Woody Harrelson<\/a>. Would this be Dupieux\u2019s crossover movie? If so, WTF would he pull this time?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt wouldn\u2019t take much for \u201cFull Phil\u201d to be his crossover movie, since the audience for Dupieux (at least in the U.S.) has long been miniscule-to-nonexistent. \u201cFull Phil,\u201d in its full-tilt Dupieux way, is an eminently watchable movie, a theater-of-the-absurd duel of wits between a father and daughter who are on vacation together in Paris (they\u2019ve gone there to mend fences, though the fact is they\u2019re at swords\u2019 points). The film, which Dupieux wrote, shot, edited, and directed, isn\u2019t as good as \u201cRubber\u201d or \u201cDeerskin.\u201d<\/a> It\u2019s middle-drawer mishegas \u2014 though part of what\u2019s sort of fun about it, and also interesting (even when it gets overdone), is that the director, in this case, is truly coming on like he has something to say.<\/p>\n

\n\tJust about the entire movie unfolds inside a beige Paris hotel suite, and then a fancy restaurant, where Philip Doom (Harrelson), who is some sort of wealthy blowhard, and his 32-year-old daughter, Madeleine (Stewart), are sitting around berating each other. It\u2019s made clear that the chief antagonist is Philip, who starts off by griping that Madeleine isn\u2019t confining herself to her half of the suite. That\u2019s such a petty complaint that she seems utterly justified in being annoyed by it. But we also see that getting pissed off at Philip is Madeleine\u2019s automatic reset stance.<\/p>\n

\n\tIs it something he did? From the start, Dupieux uses the characters allegorically. They have the relationship they have (and yes, the movie will color that in), but Phil, the ebulliently grumpy 60ish dad, with his grinning and shouting and need for control, is a stand-in for a certain generation of domineering male, while Madeleine, whose impatience with her father is off the hook, is a stand-in for a certain generation of women whose reaction against that control is as pitiless as a steel blade. She won\u2019t give an inch (and he won\u2019t either).<\/p>\n

\n\tIn at least one way, Philip seems a bit nuts: The toilet in his half of the suite is stuffed up (Madeleine\u2019s fault!), but he refuses to call hotel maintenance to have them unclog it, because he thinks that\u2019s embarrassing. Woody Harrelson declaims every line, upping the relentless factor of Phil\u2019s mania. But he also lets you see Phil\u2019s honest desire to win back his daughter\u2019s love. For a while, the two characters go at each other with a yin-and-yang of toxic intolerance. And when Lucie (Charlotte Le Bon), a hotel worker, drops by the suite, observes what\u2019s going on, and insists on staying because she finds Philip\u2019s behavior too \u201caggressive,\u201d the film\u2019s allegory is complete. Lucie is the \u201cwoke\u201d scold, representing the force that always makes Philip feel like he\u2019s being watched and condemned, which only triggers his asshole attitude all the more.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet Dupieux doesn\u2019t stage any of this in a didactic or judgmental way. Instead, he wants to turn some of the currents of middle-class life into a spectacle of chortling farce, the way Bu\u00f1uel did. But that\u2019s a bit of a lofty comparison, since \u201cFull Phil\u201d is mostly the two-hander as broad comic hate-fest.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf the tone of these scenes qualifies as borderline real, I should add that there\u2019s an utterly unhinged framing device, one that the film keeps cutting back to. In a deliberately cheap-looking black-and-white faux-\u201950s horror movie, the comedy team of Tim & Eric (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim) play nerdish mad scientists who capture and bring to their laboratory a dino-fish monster who looks like a chomping-jawed gill-man made of papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9. He tears off his victims\u2019 noggins and devours those heads whole. The two scientists kill him, and then they bring him back to life \u00e0 la \u201cFrankenstein.\u201d What that all means allegorically is\u2026beats the fuck out of me.<\/p>\n

\n\tStewart, testy but reasonable, plays Madeleine as a straight-shooter, and she\u2019s clearly having fun lobbing acid insults Harrelson\u2019s way. There is, however, one eccentric thing about Madeleine: Throughout the movie, she never stops eating (a quiche, a chicken leg, a steak, street hot dogs, sauces she dips her fingers into), and since Stewart really is chowing down, part of the joke is that you wonder how they filmed all this. (They must not have done too many takes.) The other half of the joke is: The more Madeleine eats, the more her father\u2019s belly expands. By the time they go to a restaurant, which despite its elegant trappings keeps serving you food (this is starting to be very midnight-movie Bu\u00f1uel), Philip\u2019s stomach pops out of his shirt, and you can kind of tell where that\u2019s all going.<\/p>\n

\n\tPhilip, channeling Madeline\u2019s appetite, really does become \u201cfull Phil,\u201d and that\u2019s a thoroughly wacked idea; it wouldn\u2019t be a Quentin Dupieux film otherwise. Cinema of the absurd isn\u2019t necessarily meant to be \u201cunderstood.\u201d But \u201cFull Phil,\u201d brash and throttling as it is, is an italicized screw-loose satire that some will want to see, because in its halfway funny, halfway off-putting extreme way it dares to color so far outside the lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, director of the midnight cult movie \u201cRubber\u201d (about a homicidal car tire) and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,140818,85,46,6951,397,140820,70809],"class_list":["post-448635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-full-phil","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-kristen-stewart","tag-movies","tag-quentin-dupieux","tag-woody-harrelson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}