Full Phil

Being a dad to grown-up children can be a challenging business. How do you express all that love, all that frustration, to someone who is a bit, well, past hearing about all that? How do you let go of the expectation, the sense of entitlement to some kind of gratitude for the sacrifices along the way. The truth, as DIY auteur Quentin Dupieux’s personal and typically gonzo parenthood parable reveals, is ‘with difficulty’. 

The French surrealist is at his most Buñuelian in Full Phil, a chamber piece set mainly in an opulent Parisian hotel suite that cuts back and forth to a B-movie-within-a-movie, a stiff-limbed ’50s Creature from the Black Lagoon-style flick starring Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (aka comedy duo Tim and Eric) as scientists who rashly reanimate a voracious swamp creature. Our offspring will destroy us, is the combined message – and we’ll probably deserve it. 

Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart are chalk-and-cheese single-dad-and-daughter pair Phil and Madeleine Doom, a wealthy industrialist and his 32-year-old offspring on a trip to the City of Light to ‘reconnect’. And it’s not going well: personal boundaries are being trampled – she’s left something unflushable in his loo – and his aggressive vibes have drawn the attention of a hotel staff member (The White Lotus’s Charlotte Le Bon) who decides to stay in the suite for safeguarding reasons. Phil’s complaints to management fall on death ears. ‘She has excellent instincts,’ he learns. ‘She caught a pedophile last week.’

It’s Mr Creosote by way of The Substance

Phil’s repressed anger leads his petty grumbles into a wider litigation of the past. He raised Madeleine from the age of six, when her mother died, surely he at least deserves to have his calls answered? She just wants to be left alone to watch Tim and Eric hunt a swamp critter and eat… and eat. And the more she guzzles, the more girth he gains. It’s Mr Creosote by way of The Substance; a pungent, if hardly subtle, allusion to the one-way dynamic between parent and child. 

Inanimate objects spinning out of control – a homicidal tyre in Rubber, a talking jacket in Deerskin, a giant bug in Mandibles – are a Dupieux stock-in-trade, and this time it’s Harrelson’s growing belly that steals the show, a body-comedy counterpart to the recent body-horror.

Full Phil is a 70-minute short story of a film with a few good jokes, some touching moments, and two Hollywood stars really going there (Stewart’s food consumption is heroic). It’s fun but, like Mr Creosote’s mint, only wafer thin. 

Full Phil premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.