Critic Reviews

It makes for easy-breezy viewing, the daft tone landing halfway between Buñuel and the Farrelly Brothers.

Full Phil is a work of art masquerading as a B-movie, a film of depth and strange fascination – one that ends in a moment of body horror that turns strangely tender. It’s difficult to think of many other contemporary cineastes who could pull that off.

Some may see in the final gore-splattered climax a simply expedient way to wrap things up, but both Stewart and Harrelson’s performances — all in by this point, or at least tonally in tune with Dupieux’s antics — somehow sell it all emotionally.

A film about fathers and daughters, men and monsters, mountains of food and clogged toilets, Quentin Dupieux’s farcical pseudo body horror “Full Phil” is the type of movie you’ll either find yourself eating up every minute of or rejecting entirely.

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.

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.

On one hand, there’s perhaps no more honest depiction of a relationship between a parent and their adult child having hit a wall, and a point of no return. On the other hand, pushing against this inevitability is a much more intriguing concept than simply presenting it as-is, over and over again, even when its specifics are disguised by a fable.

At only 77 minutes, Full Phil disappears before its looseness becomes exhausting. By the end, the movie starts resembling Phil himself: swollen, awkward, overloaded with nervous energy, and barely functioning logic. It never fully settles into a coherent shape, but it remains strangely difficult to look away from.

Big on distended bellies and light on belly laughs, “Full Phil” is a head-scratching oddity that is overlong and underwhelming.

Full Phil accomplishes the rare task of making the viewer less and less sympathetic to these two exhausting characters.