Setting one’s low-budget genre film in a single setting is a time-honored tradition, a money-saving maneuver that makes for a simple calling-card exercise but which nonetheless requires a high level of ingenuity to pull off in any sort of satisfying way. It’s a testament to the skills of director Grégory Morin and writer David Neiss that one quickly forgets the gimmicky logline of their new film Flush — man gets head stuck in a toilet — and instead becomes deeply invested in the trials and tribulations of middle-aged loser Luc (Jonathan Lambert). The trick is to make the proceedings just plausible enough, an absurd scenario that never quite tips over into surrealism or fantasy.
The film rushes through its setup with aplomb; Luc has arrived at a nightclub to confront his ex, Val (Élodie Navarre), over visitations with their seven-year-old daughter. Luc steps into the men’s room, enters a stall, and immediately starts doing lines of blow. A phone argument with Val ensues, and while he is flummoxed and distracted, Luc gets his foot stuck in the toilet (a European style floor toilet, typically called a “squat,” is essential to this particular story). After much exertion, Luc frees his foot from the floor, but his shoe is still stuck. When he goes to fish it out, he discovers a stash of cocaine concealed in the squat. Of course, being a degenerate loser, Luc steals it, just as a dealer enters the stall. He demands to know what has become of his stash, and Luc lies and says he has no idea what the dealer is talking about. The bar owner enters, and the two men proceed to beat the hell out of Luc, stomping him into the ground and shoving his head into the squat. The men believe he is dead, and decide to close off the bathroom and come back after business hours to dispose of the body.
Clocking in at a brisk 70 minutes, Flush is mostly concerned with charting various escalations in something approximating real time; Luc regains consciousness, the camera now cutting between closeups of his head stuck underground, inches away from a drain pipe, and his body, splayed out on the floor above ground. Luc hears someone through echoes carried through the pipes, and tries desperately to get their attention. This proves fruitless when a toilet flushes and fills up the plumbing with water, almost drowning him in the process. Luc quickly realizes that increased struggling against the porcelain trap isn’t going to get him anywhere, and groping about blindly he instead tries to locate his phone. There’s also a drug-sniffing rat running around the stall, a real Chekov’s gun kind of deal, that ends in a shockingly harsh manner. We won’t spoil more plot details here, as much of the film’s pleasures lay in the particulars of how the situation keeps getting worse and worse, and how Luc manages to stave off death one incident at a time. Val eventually makes an appearance, and the bar owner eventually comes back, too, making the film more than just a solo show for Lambert. It’s all very funny, in a bleak kind of way, and Morin articulates the limited space here in pretty ingenious ways. Flush is such a short film that the whole thing threatens to settle in as little more than a bad joke, or a tossed-off lark, but its ending has some real oomph to it. Luc might be a loser, but when push comes to shove, we all have something to live for.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 4.
Comments are closed.