Flush is less than 80 minutes long, and yet you keep expecting the film to stall. A single-location thriller packed with lots of gross-out horror and black comedy, its high-concept narrative feels just a hair too flimsy on paper, a gauntlet thrown down that not a lot of filmmakers could successfully navigate.
Director Gregory Morin and writer David Neiss actually do manage to deliver, not just on the film’s wild premise but on some genuinely upsetting horror imagery, loads of dark humor, and a surprisingly emotional core. What could have been forgettable gimmick horror instead becomes something from which you cannot look away, no matter how much you might wish you could.
Luc (R. Jonathan Lambert) just wants to get his family back together. An addict who’s struggled with child custody issues, he’s finally got the opening that will allow him to reunite with his seven-year-old daughter. All he has to do is convince his ex, Val (Elodie Navarre), to come along and present the image of a united front. Because Val doesn’t want to talk to him, he heads to the bar where she works to plead his case, but not before slipping into a bathroom stall to do a line of coke.
This is where we meet Luc, on the verge of getting what he really wants, making one dumb decision. An encounter with the bar’s shady owner (Elliot Jenicot) and his drug dealer (Remy Adriaens) later, and Luc finds himself face down in the toilet, his head stuck in a pipe, unable to move lest a shard of the busted porcelain cuts his throat and kills him. His only hope is to somehow reach Val, but that’s easier said than done when you’re trapped in a bathroom stall, and the only thing you can see is the disgusting drain below you.
So yeah, this is a movie about a guy who gets his head stuck in a toilet, a European-style one that’s basically a hole in the floor on a slightly raised platform. Luc can move his arms and legs, and can even lower very small objects down through the cracks in the porcelain around his head, but that’s about it. And we’re trapped there with him. The movie opens with Luc inside the stall, really just a short hallway with a toilet at one end and a door at the other, and never leaves it. There are no flashbacks, no cutaways to supporting characters in the bar outside, and no breaks from the disgusting surroundings.
Narratively, it’s an exercise in creative problem solving, and we watch as Luc goes through every stage of survival horror instinct, from trying to use voice commands on his phone to picking at the porcelain around his head, hoping to dislodge some of it. And, as you might expect from a movie about a guy stuck in a toilet, things get weird.
While Luc languishes in the toilet that could soon become his tomb, the other major characters come and go, none of them wanting to call the cops but all of them thinking they should probably do something about, y’know, the guy stuck in the toilet. The story unfolds like a bizarre comedy of errors, everyone dancing around each other, trying to achieve their own ends and stumbling over themselves at every turn.
The violence, when it arrives, arrives with the impish wit of a Coen Brothers film, and visually the film has a lot of fun with its confined space, taking us down the drain with Luc, introducing new wrinkles to his predicament, and bathing the whole affair in a wonderful greenish hue that adds a layer of surreality. It’s like an even more disgusting version of the strange French dark comedies of filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with an added dose of really violent sitcom energy.
But none of what’s happening around him works if Luc is not absolutely committed, and we’re lucky there, because Lambert is phenomenal in the lead role. It’s hard to imagine many more vulnerable places than the one in which he finds himself, and he injects loads of emotional heft into what could have been a wacky B-movie premise. Luc is kind of a loser, a druggie who lost his partner and his child and now has to beg and scrape to get them back, even while still sneaking drugs and trying to pretend that he’s got everything figured out.
Yet he’s also capable of tremendous ruthlessness when it’s required, and you can see perhaps who he was at his worst, when the drugs rule his whole life. There are plenty of reasons to dislike him, and yet you can’t help but be on his side, because he feels so close to a breakthrough, to getting past that one shitty (pun intended) situation and back to the person he feels he should have been all along. That’s powerful stuff, and as much as the script never lets us forget it, it’s Lambert who keeps it all feeling alive.
I did not expect to be this moved, or this intellectually curious, about the movie where the guy gets his head stuck in a toilet, but that’s exactly the kind of film Flush is. It brings the high-concept fun, then it hits you with the gory details, and then it hits you in the heart. And it does it all without ever leaving the bathroom.
Dark Sky Films’ Flush is now available on Digital.
