In the wake of her franchise years, Kristen Stewart has made a lot of interesting choices, from playing a pearl-munching Princess Diana to a personal shopper obsessed with the ghost of her twin brother. So it should, in theory, come as no surprise that she stars in the latest surreal, highly absurdist, pitch-black comedy from the prolific French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux: Full Phil, a madcap rollercoaster ride, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. But if you thought her past work was gloriously weird, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It all begins with a mind-boggling misdirection: a campy black-and-white horror scene in which a screaming Emma Mackey is attempting to flee a monstrous creature that promptly decapitates her. But this is merely a film within the film, one that our heroine, the 30-something Madeleine (Stewart), is watching in her grand Parisian hotel suite. Next door is her irritable father, Phil (Woody Harrelson), nearing 60 and eager to reconnect with the child he’s become distanced from—though he’s finding it rather difficult so far. He’s brought them on this trip to spend quality time together, but, he explains, he also needs his personal space, which Madeleine has already violated by not only using his bathroom but clogging his toilet, too. Madeleine, in turn, is fed up with his moaning, preferring to watch her movie and binge eat her way through the entire room service menu instead of engaging with him.

Their bickering brings in a concerned hotel employee, Lucie (The White Lotus’s Charlotte Le Bon), who suggests that Phil may have a problem with aggression—a comment that enrages him even more. She insists on staying to observe them, for Madeleine’s safety, and the two women bond.

What follows is the hellish account of a single evening: Phil and Madeleine head out into Paris, a city being ravaged by riots; they dine at a swanky restaurant, where Lucie continues to observe them, seemingly in order to protect Madeleine; and then the trio return to the hotel room for a wine-fuelled rager. All the while, Phil is after one thing: having sacrificed so much to raise Madeleine on his own, after her mother died when she was just six, he wants confirmation from her that, despite the strain between them more recently, he was and still is a good father. And he wants to know that she still loves him.

It all makes for a heady, fizzy, often stomach-turning cocktail. From the jump, the dialogue is intentionally overwritten, verbose and stilted, and the frequent cuts back and forth to the aforementioned horror movie that Madeleine is watching—which turns into a mini Frankenstein, with the monster killed and then resurrected by two scientists—is equally alienating. I can see many viewers being put off straight away, but if you stick with Full Phil, and especially if you’re partial to a very generous dose of bizarre, twisted humor, you’ll be in for a treat.

Chief among the film’s pleasures is Stewart, who spends the entirety of its runtime—pleasurably, just an hour and 18 minutes, basically an episode of TV these days—eating constantly. She picks up a giant hunk of quiche and gobbles it, chows down on steak, eats tarts whole, and scoops mayo up with her hands and shovels it into her mouth. Meanwhile, Phil’s stomach begins to balloon. Even when he tells her to stop eating, she doesn’t.

It’s a part Stewart devours with relish, leaning into Madeleine’s overgrown brattiness, burping loudly, and delivering withering parental put-downs with a smirk. She’s an ideal match for Harrelson’s frantic desperation, which gives way to angry frustration and eventually despair, as Phil finally comes to terms with his daughter’s laissez-faire detachment.

There’s also plenty of comedy to be found in the various bonkers set pieces: angry protesters set the pair’s car alight at one point, while their French driver simply shrugs and says he doesn’t speak English and Madeleine continues to inhale baked goods. Another scene in the hotel room, in which Phil is flailing and Madeleine euphoric, made me collapse with laughter.

Amongst the madness, there’s some commentary here on consumerism, prosperous ambivalence, and the totally unselfconscious way in which some Americans, and tourists in general, treat Paris like their own private playground. But mostly it’s just Dupieux having fun.

Your mileage may vary on an ending that will be every bit as divisive as the film that precedes it, but it’s hard to begrudge this little sliver of a movie—economical, light on its feet, with a small cast and just a handful of locations—which still manages to land a big punch. Sure, we probably don’t need the horror film within the film, and the whole thing is about as subtle as being whacked over the head with a mallet (Phil’s surname is literally “Doom”), but I, for one, never wanted it to end—a messed-up, queasy-making love child of Emily in Paris and The White Lotus that is guaranteed to provide a raucous time at the theater.