Flush (2025)
Directed by Grégory Morin
Screenplay by David Neiss
Starring Jonathan Lambert, Rémy Adriaens, Elliot Jenicot, & Élodie Navarre.

Thriller

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SLIGHT SPOILERS.

There are always films at Fantasia that challenge what’s possible, whether in terms of story or form, and at Fantasia 2025 one of those films is Grégory Morin’s Flush, a nerve-racking thriller that largely takes place in a bathroom stall. The film focuses on Luc (Jonathan Lambert), a cokehead who heads to the club where his ex Val (Élodie Navarre) works to somehow reconnect with her and figure out a way forward concerning their child. That might sound like a run-of-the-mill drama on any other day; however, Luc’s seemingly normal mission gets wildly complicated after he not only gets his foot stuck in a toilet, he also tries to lift a drug stash belonging to the club’s owner, Sam (Elliot Jenicot). From there, Luc’s life spins dangerously out of control. Flush takes a very limited setting and turns it into a delightfully brutal carnival full of damaged people trying to survive their own individual pains.
There’s a wonderful duality of humanity happening in Flush. Luc himself is a bit of a piece of shit and he makes a lot of foolish mistakes, yet he’s trying hard to change something about his life, if only for his daughter. Later when he tells his daughter a big lie, his heart is in the right place; his head is not. More intriguing is Sam. He’s deeply connected to a former drug-sniffing rat called Rabla who’s now his best friend. A brutal moment of violence Sam commits against Luc is quickly juxtaposed with Sam’s loving treatment of the rat. It’s all about how Flush portrays the duality in humanity: people, including the worst of us, are rarely ever entirely good or entirely bad.

Morin’s film is, more than anything else, about broken people. Luc’s sunk so low that he literally gets stuck head first in the shitter. In a desperate moment, he’s able to make a phone call to his mother, but she barely lets him get a word in and instead laces into him about his past behaviour, as she assumes he’s been using again. Thankfully Luc doesn’t sink in the shit and keeps on going, no matter how rough things get for him. Then there’s Val, who doesn’t seem to feel worthy of being a mother to her own daughter. She thinks she’s a bad role model. At one point, she actually leaves Luc in his toilet predicament because she can’t bear to talk about their daughter any longer. Again, most interesting in terms of broken people throughout Flush is Sam. When Val tells Luc all about Sam’s past she mentions he was in Afghanistan and says: “The war really broke him.” Each character in Morin’s film has depth, flaws, and sweet aspects of their personalities—they’re all painfully human, and Luc’s painful humanity particularly informs the trajectory of all their fates.
Flush is a thrilling little film about broken people trying to hold onto whatever shattered little pieces of their lives they have left. In spite of Luc’s flaws, he only wants his daughter to be happy. He might not be going about accomplishing that in the best way, but he does care. Even Val trying to keep her distance from her daughter is an act of good since she doesn’t believe she’s able to be a proper mother and she’s probably right. Then there’s Sam who just wants to be friends with a rat yet can’t escape his worst self. Regardless of their situations, each of Flush‘s prominent characters have desperately been trying to change, and they’re each having trouble with it on some level. Morin does well portraying the frantic madness that occurs when damaged people wind up with their backs against the wall and nowhere to go but through each other, one way or another.