If I were told that “Ash” was originally a concept for a music video for artist and musician Flying Lotus just stretched to ninety-five minutes, I’d believe it. That’s not a knock on the film’s length but rather a testament to its free-flowing rhythm and spirit. The way music videos can follow a narrative but have the mobility to explore various tangents or present visuals that don’t tie back to the main story, so too does “Ash” saunter with a sort of freedom that’s unbound from a typical narrative film structure, writer-director Lotus intercutting its slice of chamber piece sci-fi with nightmarish visuals and rugged action sequences.
Lotus’ film isn’t trying to be highbrow sci-fi; it benefits from knowing exactly the type of movie it’s trying to be. And, when it counts, it rewards the patience of those willing to sit through some played-out and conventional beats. It’s the “Dead Space” film we never got, “Prometheus” on an acid trip with a dash of “Solaris,” all seeped in enough bisexual lighting to give “Blade Runner 2049” a run for its money. It’s a movie destined to become a staple of midnight screenings for years to come.
Even in its opening, “Ash” displays a visual dynamism as it tells a familiar story of sci-fi discovery gone wrong. We meet Riya (Eiza González) waking up at a station on a distant planet with no memory of why she’s there or what’s happened to her. Exploration throughout the station only yields more questions: the dead bodies of her crew, flickering lights, and a computer system that won’t stop mentioning that there’s an “unusual life force detected” are all that greet the newly-conscious Riya. It’s in her discovery that the film feels most like a video game (the aforementioned “Dead Space” comparisons are appropriate here, but so is the underrated “The Callisto Protocol”). As we see the brutal ways her crew has been dispatched, their corpses bathed in the red warning lights of the station, we stumble upon an intriguing element of the mystery: Could Riya have done this? It’s a whodunit where the suspect and detective are one and the same, everything buoyed by the lull of whirring machines and a soundtrack of sinister sonics.
Riya’s awakening is interrupted by the arrival of Brion (Aaron Paul), another crew member who comes to her station and claims to have received her distress signal. There’s natural intrigue, mainly because we can’t shake the fact that she’s been at the bloody aftermath in scenes prior, making us unsure who to trust. Paul and Gonzalez are stellar together, playing two people with a shared backstory that only one can remember, thrust together by necessity and having to display enough vulnerability to be trustworthy even if doubts of the other haunt their visage. Even more disconcerting is the ever-persistent declaration of the computer system that an unusual lifeform remains on the station; it’s a fitting and necessary gag that pays off horrifically by the film’s end.
In this middle stretch, the film loses focus and feels like it’s passing time before it can shift into crazier gear. In flashbacks, we see more of Kiya’s crew and you can take your pick on all the tropes that we see for the umpteenth time: the crew debating the cost of the mission versus the lives of the crew, the dangers of working with an extraterrestrial life force they can’t hope to understand, etc.
But once Riya fully understands what happened to her and her crew, it delivers in spades. Gnarly, it’s the type of film that makes you want to protect your body’s pores and holes for fear of what may try to crawl and worm its way in there. No one action sequence is the same, with a flashback that showcases Riya grappling with her expedition’s leader, Adhi (Iko Uwais), shot entirely in first person view (for fans of the Indonesian actor, fear not: he remains the best fighter and undeniable badass whether he’s raiding Jakarta apartments or on an alien planet here). It’s particularly rewarding to see González, who has proven her action chops in franchise projects, finally star in a vehicle that knows how to utilize her action skills well; her fights are born out of desperation and violent sense of self-discovery, each punch and stab a sort of catharsis and illumination of the mystery of what’s happened to her.
Though the thick neon lighting can be distracting, Lotus avoids that annoying trope where the setting obfuscates the action or horrors; he lets the camera linger on bloodied faces transfixed into savage grins and lets us revel in a particularly wince-inducing moment where skin is slowly ripped from one’s neck.
“Ash” may not reinvent the sci-fi horror genre, but Flying Lotus knows when to subvert tropes and when to lean into them. When it’s all executed with as controlled a precision as we see here, it’s nothing less than thrilling. It’s a B-movie operating at the highest levels of craftsmanship, intrigue, and performance. Sometimes it’s just fun to watch someone know and deliver exactly what they want to give you, and do so with flying colors—bisexual lighting and all.
