Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Flying Lotus
Written by Jonni Remmler
Ash is a big, bombastic science fiction horror film that wears its influences on its sleeves. It offers a thrilling opening sequence and a monstrous conclusion but gets completely lost in its storytelling. Director/composer Flying Lotus crafted lovely psychedelic visuals and composed a soundtrack that thunders with propulsive energy, but unmemorable characters and a confusing plot prove this film’s undoing.
Ash has all the right pieces and parts to be a stellar horror space thriller. It has the energy of a music video and the pace of a horror video game, both explicitly influential to Flying Lotus. The film’s title is derived from the planet, Ash, described by the crew assigned to investigate this planet. Ash looks like a snow globe inside a lava lamp as seen through a kaleidoscope lens. Trippy! The astronaut crew has been assigned to determine the planet’s terraforming viability. Good luck!
Following the plot proves difficult, as the environment is chaotic, and the amount of misdirection, flashbacks, and hallucinations makes for tricky plot tracking. The metaphor of wandering into the ash storm of the planet is apt for how the middle of the movie feels. I got lost in the maze of plot twists. Characters appear to die multiple times, but the memories of Riya, the main protagonist, are faulty. An unreliable narrator in a loud and dreamy presentation? Again, good luck making sense of things.
The Cast of Ash
- Eiza González plays Riya, a survivor of a massacre on the research station on Ash. She is suffering from amnesia, but flashes of her memories are piercing through her waking mind, revealing the horrors of what happened.
- Aaron Paul plays Brion, who is sent down from the orbiting space station on a shuttle in response to a distress call from the station.
- Iko Uwais plays Captain Adhi, the stoic leader of the crew. He is cautious and protective.
- Kate Elliott is Clarke, a boisterous woman with a rough-and-tumble attitude.
- Beulah Koale portrays Kevin, Riya’s loving partner.
- Flying Lotus plays Davis, the wisecracking team member whose major accomplishment is cooking tasty beans for the crew.
A Short Synopsis of Ash
We enter the movie in media res. Claxons blare. Lights flash. Riya is recovering from a concussion and is awakened by the cacophony of emergency warnings. As she stumbles her way through a planetary observation base, she discovers her teammates, her crew, dead. Riya struggles to recall what happened. Did she kill the rest of the crew? Memories arrive in blinding flashes. Visions of her fighting her teammates intermix with happier times when the crew was set to be the first humans to set foot on Ash.
Compounding the horrifying scene around her, the station has multiple breaches that must be fixed before the building becomes uninhabitable for lack of oxygen. She encounters Brion at an airlock, and after a brief standoff, he explains that he had been summoned down planet as a rescue mission when the emergency signals reached the orbital station. Brion arrives in the landing shuttle, but the pair decides to see if they can find a missing crewmate and stabilize the station before abandoning their post.
Riya recalls a ground mission where they encounter ruins from an alien civilization. One of their team members gets killed on the mission, and soon, the realization is that there is an intelligent and malevolent alien that has infiltrated their crew. But who? Riya? Brion? One of the dead astronauts? A trip to the surgical bot might provide some answers, but the invasive alien takes sudden and violent countermeasures to prevent its domination plans from being discovered. Can Riya and Brion devise a solution and get back in orbit before the alien claims them too?
The Production Values of Ash
In the Q&A session for Ash at the Overlook Film Festival, Flying Lotus described his love of video games and how much he loved the plots and immediate thrills that games like Dead Space and Silent Hill deliver. To that end, Ash is a success. It plays like a live adaptation of Half-Life, with the frenetic pace, violent and gory clashes, and quick cut camera action. It also makes you queasy in the way that first-person video games often make you feel. The soundtrack is LOUD, and the experimental electronic composer side of Flying Lotus really wanted it that way. I felt like I was in a boxing match with the movie when I came out of the theater. Some of you might like that experience. I’m too old for that shit. (Insert creaky bones sound effects.)
The action scenes deliver. You don’t put Iko Uwais in a movie and not use his unbelievable martial arts prowess. For those uninitiated, he’s the star of The Raid, one of the great martial arts films ever made. When he fights, he is spectacular. I could have used more of that. The monster aliens are also clever parasitic critters. The FX work done for them was very clean, and the final battle scene was a direct homage to the blood test scene from The Thing. Put your budget where your mouth is! Good decision.
Flying Lotus explicitly references Dario Argento for the look he wants in this movie, and it shows. The entire film is bathed in red and blue primary colors, blending magentas and purples in between. It is a fantastical vision, and in a movie like this, Lotus argued that nobody is looking for the light source. As a result, there is an otherworldly cosmic madness in play. Also, the costumes are terrific. The space suits are familiar but not derivative, and they look great on the actors.
The Performances in Ash
Eiza González is a lovely actress. She looks great in the space suit, and her action chops are formidable. However, she didn’t have the gravitas to carry the lead in this film. Her character was in reaction mode the entire time, and the character arc was dead flat. The attempts through flashbacks to establish some background felt like stickers. There is so little dialogue, as much of the film is about Riya exploring the environment (Again, video game feels), that the script limits her ability to show growth and personality.
The rest of the cast has very little screen time, except to fight and die, rise up, and fight and die again. In some of the famed precedent movies for Ash: The Thing, Alien, Event Horizon, and Pandorum, those stories invest in the supporting characters so that they at least have a role in the universe. Apart from Captain Adhi, none of the characters had a specific job, let alone much of a personality. That is a baseline expectation in a science-fiction thriller.
A curious side note: some of the best reactions in the theater were for the surgical robot, a Japanese-speaking armature of needles, pliers, and scalpels that merrily searches for alien infections. This droid’s levity is a much-needed resting spot for a movie full of pulse-pounding action. <BONK BONK>
Concluding Thoughts
You cannot fault this film for a lack of ambition. The visual vibrance stands out from its peers, and the sonic layering on top of the technicolor madness makes this a visceral experience. The story holds on to its mysteries too long, spending much of its time executing sleights of hand to throw the audience off the scent. Combining the heavy misdirection with a chaotic aesthetic confused me. So, I got lost in the plot. Normally, a science fiction creature feature is right up my alley. I eventually received my monster madness at the end, but I would have appreciated more of that spread through the film.
Instead, I came out a little dazed. Flying Lotus is an artist with great talent, but unfortunately, he needed to rein in his tendencies, at least for me. Potentially, Ash could find a cult following. I am positive that if you saw this movie on mushrooms, it would be amazing. Alas, those days of tripping out are buried deep in my past, so I will leave it to others to bathe in the phantasmagoria of Ash on psychedelics.
Ash has already been released in theaters, and it may be available in second-run theaters. The world premiere for Ash was at SXSW, and it was also a featured production at the Overlook Film Festival. The MPAA gave Ash an R-rating for bloody violence, gore, and language.
Review by Eric Li
