Sometimes a movie can run nearly three hours and feel like it's over in a flash. Other times, a film clocks in at a brisk 78 minutes and somehow steals half your day. Quentin Dupieux's Full Phil, which premiered at Cannes 2026, falls squarely into the latter category. Despite a promising setup—a father and daughter attempting to reconnect on a Parisian vacation, interwoven with a black-and-white film-within-a-film—the result is an exhausting exercise in pretentiousness that makes you question why absurdist comedy has become so fashionable.
Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson Struggle with a Repetitive Script
Kristen Stewart plays Madeleine Doom, a woman introduced scarfing down muffins and quiche while glued to an old Hollywood movie in a lavish hotel suite. Her father, Philip Doom (Woody Harrelson), is the quintessential high-maintenance American dad: fretting over a clogged toilet, worrying about crumbs on the carpet, and complaining to hotel staff like a stereotypical "Karen." The dynamic is set early: Madeleine is a consumer, Phil is a control freak, and their vacation is already doomed.
Both actors give it their all, but the script—penned by Dupieux himself—repeats the same points ad nauseam. Madeleine's mother died when she was young, leaving Phil to raise her alone while battling depression. As a result, Madeleine is standoffish, flippant, and cruel to her father's attempts at reconciliation. The root of their estrangement is never clear, only that they're trapped in a toxic pattern that most families outgrow by adulthood.
The bulk of the film consists of the pair bickering. Phil wants Madeleine to admit he was, at times, a good father. Madeleine seems content to run up the room service bill and eat incessantly, indifferent to his pleas. Watching over them is Lucie (Charlotte Le Bon), an oddly insightful hotel worker who suspects Phil is hiding something. Le Bon delivers the film's best moments, but even her sharp comedic timing can't rescue this slog through purgatory.
Absurdist Comedy at Its Most Pretentious
The film's central conceit is a black-and-white movie that Madeleine watches, intercut with the main narrative. It draws from classics like Frankenstein and Creature From the Black Lagoon, but instead of clever homage, we get Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker as bumbling pseudo-scientists chasing a fish monster that decapitated a woman (Emma Mackey, with one real line). Their dialogue is tedious and unfunny, feeling like a hipster freshman's first attempt at a script—better suited for fanfiction than a film. At least that segment's tone makes some sense; the real sins come when Stewart and Harrelson are on screen.
One has to wonder if Dupieux has ever had a meaningful conversation with a woman. Stewart's Madeleine isn't just bratty—she's sociopathic, careless, and utterly self-absorbed. Her character has the depth of a puddle, and the dialogue is so stilted it feels like a parody of "woman written by a man." Meanwhile, Harrelson's Phil oscillates between hysterics and whining, especially when he bloats up like a balloon. His lines could be boiled down to a few repeated sentences: he's not violent, not angry, just desperate to connect. But by the end, when he's immobile and crying, any sympathy evaporates. Harrelson handles the physical comedy well, but it's not enough to save the film.
For a better example of absurdist comedy done right, check out Sam Raimi's Send Help, which proves chaos can be hilarious when it's not pretentious.
Thank God It's Short, But That's Not Enough
The only redeeming factor is the runtime, though the final minutes drag as everything slows to a crawl and we're subjected to a half-hearted flashback that should have been placed near the beginning. The actors are decent, but there's hardly enough material to sink into. The setting—a bougie Parisian hotel straight out of White Lotus—is lush, but wasted. If you're looking for a comedy that earns its absurdity, try Sunny Nights, a crime comedy masterpiece with a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score.
Full Phil fails on almost all fronts. It's a pretentious, exhausting mess that squanders its talented cast and intriguing premise. Avoid it, even if you're a die-hard fan of Kristen Stewart or Woody Harrelson. There are far better ways to spend 78 minutes—like watching these comedy shows that proved their brilliance in just 10 minutes.
