Flush

Bluesky

Winner of the Audience Award at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, Grégory Morin’s mélange of toilet humour and despair is a film designed to be watched in company, the more raucous the better, as each new humiliation faced by its hero raises the stakes and, potentially, the roof. It’s the intermittently brutal, gleefully grotesque tale of a man who has undoubtedly brought his troubles on himself, but it’s sufficiently well handled that, by the end, you will really feel for him.

Set almost entirely within a single toilet stall, this is low budget filmmaking par excellence, but Morin keeps his camera active, using close-ups and multiple levels to create a dynamic that would be difficult to replicate onstage. He and writer Daid Neiss thoroughly explore the possibilities offered by the setting without it coming across simply as a list of gags, and find a number of ways to introduce conversations through which they can depict a wider world.

The unfortunate individual at the centre of it all is Luc (Jonathan Lambert), a dishevelled-looking middle aged man with a serious coke habit and an even more messed up personal life. He has been pestering his ex, Val (Élodie Navarre), with unwanted phone calls for weeks, and has now reached the point of going to look for her at her work, a local nightclub. It’s the usual story – he wants them to get back together, he plans to change everything about himself, and this time he really means it – but it’s complicated by the fact that they have a daughter, Zoe, who is living with his mother. Val has decided that the child is better off without her and that it will be kindest to make a clean break. Luc hopes to persuade her otherwise. The ongoing presence of this element in the background of the story humanises the characters and raises the stakes.

Whilst it goes high, everything else goes low. Lower and lower, in fact, as Luc proceeds from getting his foot stuck in a squat toilet to having his badly beaten face wedged in there instead. With further threats of violence looming over him, a rat taking an interest, a glory hole in the stall wall, and the unfortunate consequences of several toilets using the same drainage channel, he must use all his scant faculties to try to escape.

It’s Lambert’s performance that holds the whole thing together as he manages to give Luc enough humanity to make us care ever if we recognise that he’s a long way from redemption. over and over again, we see Luc’s past mistakes come back to bite him. Reminiscent of the toilet scene in Trainspotting, but 70 minutes long and with a gut punch of an ending, Flush is a film made for a very specific kind of audience, but if it sounds good to you, you’re unlikely to be disappointed. And if you’re a parent with teenagers you’d like to deter from trying cocaine, this is the film to show them.

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