Quentin Dupieux is not only an electronic musician (who earned a UK number one back in 1999) but also the finest surrealist filmmaker of our times. To say his movies are unpredictable, illogical, ridiculous and violent is an understatement. But their wildness and their misbehaviour has the feel of ordinary life taken to the extreme. They also carry unbreakable internal rules which all their characters know, meaning that all their nonsense is very easy for audiences to accept. And his work ethic is something else; Full Phil is his seventh feature film since 2022, with an eighth film, an animated feature called Vertiginous is due to be released later this year. This means a Dupieux film is an unmissable event, and Full Phil is his first work in English in over a decade. There are not many filmmakers who have defined themselves an area of expertise with total creative freedom and major stars begging to work with him, but Mr. Dupieux is one of these happy few. His work is too deliberately upsetting to be pure joy, but the fact Full Phil exists is.
Almost the whole movie takes place in a magnificent hotel suite in Paris, where the room service is prompt, the food is fantastic, and the screams from the violent protests in the streets outside can’t be heard. Philip Doom (Woody Harrelson) has booked this suite for a holiday to reconnect with his daughter Madeleine (Kristen Stewart). There are only a few problems. Firstly, Madeleine couldn’t care less about bonding with her dad; all she wants to do is watch a 1950s-era schlock-horror movie on her portable player. Secondly, she blocked one of the toilets in the suite and doesn’t want to bother housekeeping with this, which Philip finds so ridiculous he’s prepared to tackle the plumbing himself. Their arguments about this become so serious one of the hotel staff, Lucie (Charlotte Le Bon), decides it’s not safe to leave Philip and Madeleine alone together. She quietly seats herself over to the side and cannot be budged, which the other hotel staff approve of; her instincts are never wrong. And finally, Madeleine is eating non-stop, and this does mean without ceasing. All the delicious meals sent up from room service are consumed with her fingers, including the mashed potatoes, as Philip observes in flabbergasted horror. There’s no point trying to guess what might happen from here.
The whip-crack shifts between the ‘creature feature’ horror movie (in which Emma Mackey, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim play important parts), the dysfunction in the hotel and the violence in the streets are both very funny and disquieting. Mr. Dupieux does have a terrifying gift for building a creepy, foreboding, worrisome mood, undercutting that mood with preposterous comedic violence, and then ratcheting the tension up again. He is his own screenwriter, cinematographer and editor, too, and this total control of tone keeps everything flowing. His movies tend to be short – Full Phil is a tight 78 minutes – but that just means the jokes and the dread aren’t overplayed. Mr. Harrelson has a willingness to get weird that he has only occasionally explored in his film work, while Ms Stewart’s self-containment has rarely been better weaponised. Their bickering has a bite. The entire experience is unforgettable in a way almost unique to Mr Dupieux’s work; Full Phil comes close to being recognisably safe and familiar before skittering off into unexpected directions at every opportunity. If making eight films in four years results in movies this wonderful and weird all the time more people should be doing it! But they couldn’t possibly; it’s too absurd to think there’s even one Quentin Dupieux.
Full Phil recently played at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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