Grégory Morin
Flush

Synopsis.

In the claustrophobic universe of a nightclub bathroom, Flush by Grégory Morin unfolds entirely in a space that our Venerated Western civilization, from Pozzi Ginori to Villeroy & Boch, has always banished to the margins: the Cess. Luc (Jonathan Lambert), a man destroyed by cocaine and regrets, finds himself with his head stuck in a squat toilet after trying to win back his ex Val (Élodie Navarre), mother of their daughter Zoe. But the bathroom will not be just a physical place: it will become the stage for a descent into hell, a spiral of humiliations, arrogant rats, violence, and sewage that will force him to confront his misery and the hobbesian remains of his humanity.

Action.

Flush is an epiphany; Morin takes the stinkiest of our convivial places and transforms it into a stage for redemption and damnation. The Cess thus becomes a virtual microcosmos—metaverse and “metà sverso”—where every flush opens putrid portals of madness, artificial or not, and every pipe is an exposed nerve of the psyche. Luc, with his face in the toilet and his heart shattered, is an “Ulisse in economy” who no longer sails by sea, but by water—his blue Western horizon now replaced, at best, by cute apprentice interns from the brown whirlpool of introspection.

Leon Carax in the theater might exclaim—Voilà une orgie du grotesque et du sublime!—Glory holes as a metaphor of blind desire, rats as heralds of the unconscious, and a sewer system that finally and efficiently connects lost souls. Every line, every flush’s noise, is an echo of a world that has stopped gazing at stars and now stares at the bottom of its own abyss.

And here it is, the Manifesto of a new ontology: the vista Water. The West has always idealized the sea as a symbol of freedom, expansion, romance. But Morin tells us: enough with the sea view. It’s time to look in depth, where everything ends that the sea cannot contain. The toilet is the true mirror of the contemporary soul: dirty, narrow, but inescapably ours.

Water Nostrum.

And so what is it, among Wars exploding like darts at a Neapolitan carnival, with Nasdaq’s golden nuggets and Beat Coin shooting ever higher, unreachable, and with our Shadows growing ever smaller? Now man is tired, and seeks the drain. And in that search—between feces and redemption—he discovers that true salvation is not in cleanliness, but in accepting one’s own impossible filth. With this film that grabs you by the head and dunks it in the toilet, and does so with poetry. It’s a work that laughs, cries, and vomits, all in the same frame—cinema unafraid to get its hands dirty. In fact, it invites us to do so. Because only at the bottom of the pipe can we find what remains of us.