17/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart are the latest lucky thesps to join Quentin Dupieux’s universe, respectively incarnating a US business magnate and his estranged daughter

We know Quentin Dupieux is a keen retrofuturist; fascinatingly, in his latest little charmer, Full Phil, that extends to ‘00s-style, silver portable DVD players, with a screen smaller than that used for in-flight entertainment. It’s just the first of several mysterious objects that light up his latest collaboration with international A-listers, dressing themselves down so they can send themselves up, with Kristen Stewart, Woody Harrelson and Emma Mackey being his highest-profile and most Hollywood-centric to date. The film, whose title only becomes explicable deep into the 78-minute running time, has premiered as a Cannes Midnight Screening.

Still, the first US actors on screen are of a far more niche, cult-y variety: the infamous Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (or Tim & Eric), the US patron saints of alt- or anti-comedy, and counterparts to his use of Palmashow (Grégoire Ludig and David Marsais) in his exclusively French movies. They’re the Nobel-winning (!) mad scientists in a black-and-white B-movie pastiche that Stewart’s character, Madeleine Doom, watches on that aforementioned mini-DVD player. Kicking back for some downtime in her luxury hotel suite, with a comically copious amount of room-service food, she’s in Paris to reunite and try to mend things with her estranged father, wealthy industrialist Philip (Harrelson), who’s generously sharing the palatial room with her and footing all the bills. After a pro-forma quarrel involving a clogged toilet that becomes quite animated (Dupieux’s scatological bent showing he’s no soft-touch humourist), hotel attendant Lucie (Charlotte Le Bon, surely cast for her White Lotus cred) inspects what’s wrong, and becomes suspicious and concerned about Philip’s behaviour. Things escalate, but Dupieux also delves seriously and sincerely into the Dooms’ troubled family history – a newer slant for him.

When Lucie starts to weirdly follow them around, to keep tabs on Philip, we come to where many audiences sampling a Dupieux film might get off the train, with its mocking of contemporary sensitivities around toxic masculinity and appropriate conduct; you could say it’s very characteristic of ribald, irreverent French humour, quite divorced from the newer US “edgelord” kind (interestingly, in spite of the glittering anglophone cast, this is a 100% European production). He just about gets away with it all, especially because the craft in other respects is so impressive and nimble: his command of tone, timing (he is not discarding the old-fashioned comic tenets of set-ups and pay-offs) and the perfect infusions of surrealism. To quote David Lynch and Blue Velvet, a clear inspiration on him, Dupieux’s is a “strange world”, with its own elastic parameters and metaphysics, yet they still feel rigorously defined and controlled. It also gently expands on the social commentary seen in Yannick, one of his most acclaimed movies, as a violent and noisy protest occurs on the street outside the hotel, much to the guests’ and staff’s total indifference.

A “made guy” in Cannes, and increasingly cinema as a whole, Dupieux also has the honour of closing the Directors’ Fortnight this year with Vertiginous, his first fully animated feature. Can the mad scientists build us a time-travel device, to get us to that day already?

Full Phil is a co-production by France, Belgium and Luxembourg, staged by Chi-Fou-Mi Productions, Artémis Productions and Samsa Film. Its international sales are handled by StudioCanal.