Ash nobly flirts with a burgeoning subgenre you might call horror-anthology cinema: Horror movies with premises so simple and stripped-down that they cry out to be anthologized in a Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt type of TV series, of which there seem to be vanishingly few at present. Just as nobly, the second feature film from musician Flying Lotus fights against those constraints with psychedelic visual jam sessions, confident that with enough style, it can zip past the 95-minute mark. It’s not wrong, though there’s a customary stretch of doubt during the film’s midsection.
The beginning of Ash is a grabber, as it must be: Riya (Eiza González) wakes up in a small outpost on a distant planet, with no clear memory of who she is. There are flashes of visions from her immediate past, but not full scenes; there are also bodies, bloodied, some of which can be matched to people and incidents from her flashes with disturbing ease. The stormy planet outside is both more and less hospitable than it looks; not yet safe without protective gear, but apparently the best chance out of seven different possible Earth replacements. There are shades here, however minor, of the planet-exploration plan from Interstellar, a nice addition to the more expected touchstones of Alien and The Thing.
Yes, something will eventually creep and crawl through the outpost, though with the precise nature of this threat, Flying Lotus manages to depart a bit from his most famous ancestors. Riya is soon joined by her crewmate Brion (Aaron Paul), who has arrived via a small shuttle craft. They have a time limit to rendezvous back with the larger ship, but the question of what has happened to the others nags at her. Brion is more practical-minded, eager to leave before they run out of oxygen; it’s Riya who ultimately pushes the possibility that she had a hand in the deaths.
We do see those crewmates in a couple of Ash‘s fuller flashback scenes. It’s unclear (at least in my own addled memory) whether Riya is remembering any of this, if Brion is describing it to her, or if we’re meant to be looking at some objective reality as a relief from Riya’s heavily subjective point of view – a break, in other words, from the Flying Lotus style, which at various points resembles a video game, a drug trip, an escape room, and the music video for the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up.” It’s heavy on the red filters, flashes of faces melting, and some knockabout point-of-view shots, all designed to let the initial sci-fi trappings bleed into cosmic horror.
Like a lot of cosmic horror, Ash struggles to convey true unknowability, even when it’s set somewhere in the actual cosmos. In fact, the threat becomes creepier and more nightmarish as it gets more specific, which is both impressive – so many horror movies fall to pieces as we learn more about them – and a little frustrating, because the movie spends a fair amount of time obscuring its own plotting with a semi-scrambled timeline. It makes sense for a memory-challenged heroine, but a little of Riya’s in-her-own-head wanderings go a long way; hence that aforementioned patience-testing midsection where the vibes have been established but the action hasn’t yet really kicked in, where the movie feels as if it’s haranguing you into a freakout. The advantage to the delay, and possibly its primary reason for being, is to backload a lot of the movie’s best bits; its final half-hour goes hard with an extended fight scene, gnarly gore and accompanying visual effects, with a solid way into the creature clashes. (There may be a pun intended here.) The filmmakers also make the most of their low budget, wringing some good deadpan gags from an automatic surgery appliance that’s like a miniature version of that sleek, convenient monstrosity from Prometheus.
Is there more to this movie than Flying Lotus jamming on his influences? If there is, it doesn’t come from the performances, which work fine as far as they go, but suffer a little from the movie’s withholding. I can’t help but wonder if a more traditional structure, one that gradually descends into gnarly psychedelia rather than immersing the viewer in it immediately, might have actually been more involving, and truer to the film’s B-movie soul. Ash could be a rumination on the nature of identity, or the destructive colonial spirit of Americans, or the indescribable horrors of a world beyond our own ruined one, but despite all of its cranked-up imagery and sometimes-confusing storytelling, it’s tidier and less thought-provoking than any of that – a genre exercise, capably extended.
Director: Flying Lotus
Writer: Jonni Remmler
Starring: Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Kate Elliott, Iko Uwais
Release Date: March 21, 2025
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.
