The Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) World Premiere of Grégory Morin’s Flush (2025) scored the Audience Award for Best International Feature and it’s easy to understand why. Flush is intense, offensive, perverse, grotesque, disturbing and hilarious all at once: just what Fantasia audiences love and—let’s face it—require.
Talk about a drug deal gone wrong!! Luc (Jonathan Lambert) has snuck into a bathroom stall to snort a few lines of cocaine when he accidentally gets his foot wedged in the toilet where his drug dealer has stashed his supply. Paranoid accusations ensue and—almost before he knows it—it’s not his foot wedged in the toilet but his head. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined such a scenario nor that it would become such a visceral thriller and—in its own weird way—a sentimental family drama. Between richocheting bullets and drug-addled mice, Flush is a shitload of the unexpected, even the unwanted, veering into the unavoidable.
As Mitch Davis describes it for Fantasia’s program, Flush is “utterly, gloriously insane. Evocative of Dupieux by way of Gaspar Noé and early Álex de la Iglesia, Flush is as inventively delirious as it is hyper-cinematic, a real-time, over-the-top blast of indie brilliance with gross-out curves to spare. In the center of it all, Lambert delivers a wild performance ripping with mania and unexpected emotional depth, a unique presence amidst the escalating, absurd circumstances that twist and turn (and smash and cut) around him. Tight, imaginative and quite frankly miraculous, Flushconsistently ups the ante in darkly comic sleaze and shock, strapping it together with bigger-than-life heart to deliver a singular huis clos [“no exit”] thrill ride on the wings of drain pipes and degeneracy.”
This ain't your daddy's Roto-Rooter. Your pipes will never be the same!!
