‘Full Phil’ Review: With Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart Locked in a Father-Daughter Hatefest, Will Quentin Dupieux’s Latest Bizarro-World Lark Be His Crossover Movie?

The French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, director of the midnight cult movie “Rubber” (about a homicidal car tire) and the ticklishly perverse “Deerskin” (in which Jean Dujardin played a lonely loon obsessed with a vintage fringed suede jacket), is a dada prankster whose work inspires a different sense of anticipation from that of almost any other filmmaker. When you go into a Quentin Dupieux film, it’s with the thought, “WTF is he going to pull this time?” His movies are goofs, larks, stunts, knowingly arch bizarro-world riffs. And I was especially curious about “Full Phil,” because it combines Dupieux’s French surrealist impishness with the American star power of Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson. Would this be Dupieux’s crossover movie? If so, WTF would he pull this time?

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It wouldn’t take much for “Full Phil” to be his crossover movie, since the audience for Dupieux (at least in the U.S.) has long been miniscule-to-nonexistent. “Full Phil,” in its full-tilt Dupieux way, is an eminently watchable movie, a theater-of-the-absurd duel of wits between a father and daughter who are on vacation together in Paris (they’ve gone there to mend fences, though the fact is they’re at swords’ points). The film, which Dupieux wrote, shot, edited, and directed, isn’t as good as “Rubber” or “Deerskin.” It’s middle-drawer mishegas — though part of what’s sort of fun about it, and also interesting (even when it gets overdone), is that the director, in this case, is truly coming on like he has something to say.

Just about the entire movie unfolds inside a beige Paris hotel suite, and then a fancy restaurant, where Philip Doom (Harrelson), who is some sort of wealthy blowhard, and his 32-year-old daughter, Madeleine (Stewart), are sitting around berating each other. It’s made clear that the chief antagonist is Philip, who starts off by griping that Madeleine isn’t confining herself to her half of the suite. That’s such a petty complaint that she seems utterly justified in being annoyed by it. But we also see that getting pissed off at Philip is Madeleine’s automatic reset stance.

Is it something he did? From the start, Dupieux uses the characters allegorically. They have the relationship they have (and yes, the movie will color that in), but Phil, the ebulliently grumpy 60ish dad, with his grinning and shouting and need for control, is a stand-in for a certain generation of domineering male, while Madeleine, whose impatience with her father is off the hook, is a stand-in for a certain generation of women whose reaction against that control is as pitiless as a steel blade. She won’t give an inch (and he won’t either).

In at least one way, Philip seems a bit nuts: The toilet in his half of the suite is stuffed up (Madeleine’s fault!), but he refuses to call hotel maintenance to have them unclog it, because he thinks that’s embarrassing. Woody Harrelson declaims every line, upping the relentless factor of Phil’s mania. But he also lets you see Phil’s honest desire to win back his daughter’s love. For a while, the two characters go at each other with a yin-and-yang of toxic intolerance. And when Lucie (Charlotte Le Bon), a hotel worker, drops by the suite, observes what’s going on, and insists on staying because she finds Philip’s behavior too “aggressive,” the film’s allegory is complete. Lucie is the “woke” scold, representing the force that always makes Philip feel like he’s being watched and condemned, which only triggers his asshole attitude all the more.

Yet Dupieux doesn’t stage any of this in a didactic or judgmental way. Instead, he wants to turn some of the currents of middle-class life into a spectacle of chortling farce, the way Buñuel did. But that’s a bit of a lofty comparison, since “Full Phil” is mostly the two-hander as broad comic hate-fest.

If the tone of these scenes qualifies as borderline real, I should add that there’s an utterly unhinged framing device, one that the film keeps cutting back to. In a deliberately cheap-looking black-and-white faux-’50s horror movie, the comedy team of Tim & Eric (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim) play nerdish mad scientists who capture and bring to their laboratory a dino-fish monster who looks like a chomping-jawed gill-man made of papier-mâché. He tears off his victims’ noggins and devours those heads whole. The two scientists kill him, and then they bring him back to life à la “Frankenstein.” What that all means allegorically is…beats the fuck out of me.

Stewart, testy but reasonable, plays Madeleine as a straight-shooter, and she’s clearly having fun lobbing acid insults Harrelson’s way. There is, however, one eccentric thing about Madeleine: Throughout the movie, she never stops eating (a quiche, a chicken leg, a steak, street hot dogs, sauces she dips her fingers into), and since Stewart really is chowing down, part of the joke is that you wonder how they filmed all this. (They must not have done too many takes.) The other half of the joke is: The more Madeleine eats, the more her father’s belly expands. By the time they go to a restaurant, which despite its elegant trappings keeps serving you food (this is starting to be very midnight-movie Buñuel), Philip’s stomach pops out of his shirt, and you can kind of tell where that’s all going.

Philip, channeling Madeline’s appetite, really does become “full Phil,” and that’s a thoroughly wacked idea; it wouldn’t be a Quentin Dupieux film otherwise. Cinema of the absurd isn’t necessarily meant to be “understood.” But “Full Phil,” brash and throttling as it is, is an italicized screw-loose satire that some will want to see, because in its halfway funny, halfway off-putting extreme way it dares to color so far outside the lines.