Flush Review (Fantasia 2025)
Flush – Grégory Morin’s squalid restroom farce is a hilarious tour de force of turds, trauma, and cocaine catastrophes.
Desperate drug hoover Luc skulks to the bathroom for a quick toot before confronting his estranged girlfriend, hoping to persuade her to join him in visiting their even more estranged 7-year-old daughter on her birthday. However, this proves one sneaky snort too many as he inadvertently twists the melons of a ruthless club owner and finds him self stomped into a filthy squat hole and left for dead.
Luc may have survived the mauling, but he is now hopelessly trapped, surveying a vista of sloppy stools and used tampons. He now faces a claustrophobic race against flushing poo pipes, a case of the Vincent van Gogh’s, and a nasty ex-narc rodent with heavy substance issues.
This endlessly inventive Coke parable is as disgusting as it dazzling. Full of energy and flair, Flush takes you places you don’t want to go but makes sure you have a fun time once you get there. Imagine if Trainspotting were a Monty Python movie and Gaspar Noé had directed the infamous toilet scene, and you will have a good idea of the madness on offer.
Filterless and full of WTF moments, there is also a great deal of technical acumen in Flush, ingenious writing, and economical world building, shovelling the faeces into the fan. Slick camerawork in such a confined space isn’t easy, and the film always looks stylish. Especially accomplished is the close-up work that draws us into each terrible setback and every small victory.
Each character we encounter is flawed in some way. Luc reeks of dishonour and desperation, a narcissistic scumbag propagating the lies he tells himself. His girlfriend is so self-centred and deluded by drugs that she has convinced herself that abandoning her child was an act of altruism. Sam, the violent club owner, is ravaged by PTSD and struggles against narcotic coping mechanisms. Even Rabia, Sam’s ex-sniffer rat, is a slave to the substances he was trained to search for.
Every time Luc seems to have reached his lowest ebb, something even worse happens, a neat allegory for the rock bottom concept addicts embrace instead of productive change. Indeed, the entire movie could be perceived as an anti-drug message of the fuck around and find out variety.
Flush begins as a minimalist comedy of errors and escalates into slapstick carnage where already damaged people finally crumble. High concept but low maintenance, it’s a brazenly entertaining flick that finds layers of subtlety in the mechanics of pandemonium and celebrates the minutiae of chaos.
★★★★
World premiere at Fantasia on the 27th July 2025 / Jonathan Lambert, Rémy Adriaens, Elliot Jenicot, Élodie Navarre / Dir: Grégory Morin / AJM STUDIO
- 23rd August Update – This also played 2025 FrightFest 22nd August 2025
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