Full Phil at Fantastic Fest, 22 Sept 2026
Full Phil begins in black and white, with a diptych of scenes. First we see mad scientists Chad (Tim Heidecker) and Andy (Eric Wareheim) taking a break from their laboratory work by heading out for a recreational hunt, and then we see a young screaming woman (Emma Mackey) being chased by a batrachian/human hybrid in a swamp. From the monochrome presentation, stilted dialogue, cheap lo-fi sets and ridiculous rubber-suited frogman, this is a loving throwback to the Corman-era B-picture.
There is another sort of diptych at play in Quentin Dupieux’s film. For in fact that creature feature is being watched on a portable Blu-ray player by 32-year-old American Madeleine Doom (Kristen Stewart) in an expensive Parisian hotel suite that she is sharing with her estranged, widowed father Philip (Woody Harrelson). In this all-colour section of the film, set in the present day, Madeleine regularly returns to the Fifties creature feature so that it runs in parallel with her own story – much as Chad and Andy are former winners of a Nobel Prize for what is expressly called ‘parallel science’.
Philip has invited his daughter on this luxurious weekend stopover in the hope of reconnecting with her, but she would rather be anywhere else, or at least with anyone else. So Madeleine seeks refuge in her headphones, in the monster movie, and in the abundant food – whether from repeat room service orders or from the restaurant called L’assiette pleine (or ‘the full plate’) whose ‘concept’ is ‘unlimited re-serves’ – that she is constantly eating in monstrous quantities. In fact, her bottomless appetite is shared by the film-within-a-film’s creature which swallows several human heads whole – and just as the monster, despite coming from the swamp, mysteriously does not smell (“it’s an impoossibility for an aquatic creature not to stink”, as the puzzled Andy observes), Madeleine, for all the food that she devours, appears to stay starving and to suffer no ill effects, while Phil, who eats almost nothing, expands and expands over the course of the film until he looks ready to give birth, in fulphilment of the title. Here father and daughter are codependent, but out of balance, with Phil carrying the burden not just of all that Madeleine eats, but also shouldering a disproportionate amount of the guilt, trauma and grief for the death, decades earlier, of his wife – and of Madeleine’s mother – which both ought to share equally.
The third wheel in this already fraught relationship is Lucie (Charlotte Le Bon), an employee at the hotel who insists on hanging around as a precaution after her sixth sense tells her that Phil may be about to do violence, and whose gaze gradually shifts from Phil to Madeleine, even if, in reading the signals of the young guest’s sexuality, Lucie’s much-vaunted intuitions prove to involve an uncanny confusion of the character with the actress playing her. “Is this a dream?”, Madeleine asks as Lucie gives her a private wine tasting in the hotel’s cellar. Here Madeleine’s dream of insatiable, consequence-free hedonism is realised to the full, while Phil’s simple desire to be acknowledged and loved for his rôle as a single parent remains but a dream. Phil, for all his many flaws, serves to give, while Madeleine, like a vampire, knows only how to take.
“It’s unbelievable, it’s superdumb,” says Madeleine of the B-movie she is watching, which turns on a dime from Creature from the Black Lagoon clone to Frankenstein ripoff, “Why don’t they make movies like this anymore?” Yet Dupieux certainly does – and if at first his film-within-a-film seems to contrast with the world of Phil and Madeleine, they quickly come to share the same absurdities and utter disregard for narrative coherence. Ultimately Full Phil is a shaggy-dog story – indeed a different dog (respectively Jackson and Philippe) appears in either of its parts. There are clogged toilets, running riots, grandes bouffes and an explosive fin. At 78 minutes, it is relatively short for a feature, and by the time it is over, you may not be left hungering, like Madeleine, for more – but perhaps that is because, for its brief duration, and for its preoccupation with the uneven dynamics between parent and child, this plate is full and satisfying just as it is.
strap: In Quentin Dupieux’s surreal, superdumb cinematic smorgasbord, a father has his fill of trying to reconnect with his daughter in Paris.
© Anton Bitel
