Here's a wonderful little French bit of bad taste that plays out like a fever dream. It's neither big nor clever, and it's unlikely to become a perennial rewatch favorite, but at just a little over an hour in length, it's such a brisk and lively shock to the system that it won me over by sheer bravado alone.
Jonathan Lambert plays Luc, a hopeless cocaine addict trying to win back his ex-girlfriend. He stumbles into the secluded squat toilet in the basement of the seedy club she works at to take a phone call, and suddenly, absurdly, things begin to spiral out of control. There are pratfalls, an unexpected stash of drugs, a violent crime boss with a drug-sniffing rat, and before he knows it, Luc has his head stuck in the squat with no means of getting out.
The way director Gregory Morin plays out his insane setup is a thing to behold. Things move to so fast we never get a chance to question how illogical they are. There's a nightmarish logic to everything; things happen with the kind of inevitability we experience in dreams. Lambert plays out the desperation and denial of reality with jumpy energy, like someone receiving unexpected electric shocks at random intervals. Luc isn't an easy person to like, but he's the closest thing we've got to a protagonist, and Lambert gives us just enough to root for him to escape one way or another.
Once inside the squat toilet, the scenario works in fits and starts. You can start to spot how episodic the circumstances are, especially when the gag doesn't work. There's a particularly dire bit of gay panic that doesn't fit the rest of the film at all, and only slows down the otherwise effective pacing. Every other section sets up the next hazard or gives our hero one more tool to use. This one is just there for cheap laughs.
And make no mistake, Flush is by no means above cheap laughs. It revels in bad taste and juvenile giggles. But it takes skill to make good taste out of bad taste, and I'd argue that for the most part Flush is surprisingly smart about where and how it goes for the horrific. Watch, for example, how impishly funny Morin's use of something as simple as the voice dialer on a smartphone turns out to be.
What makes Flush work so well is that Morin never winks at the audience too hard. The situation is absurd and the gags are broad, but there's always a level of morbid finality to it all. What little glimpses we get of the outside world speak of a life that's already gone to hell. It's not like Luc has a great future ahead of him even if he does escape. As the situation escalates, it becomes a negotiation of how much more he can lose and still go on living.
That balancing act gives Flush a jolt of energy rarely found in confined space thrillers. It understands that we still need context and even a vague idea of something greater to care about this particular scenario. Morin's smart use of the limited space is greatly appreciated as well. There's a weird sense of geography to the claustrophobic toilet, and it pays off beautifully in the final act, where the slapstick buffoonery goes into overdrive.
At a lean and mean 70 minutes, it's packed with enough pitch-black humor and the finest of bad taste to remain hysterically funny and gross for its entire runtime. It's definitely not for everyone, but a select few will love it. Myself included.
