Ash, 2025.
Directed by Flying Lotus.
Starring Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais, Kate Elliott, Beulah Koale, and Flying Lotus.
SYNOPSIS:
A woman wakes up on a distant planet and finds the crew of her space station viciously killed. Her investigation into what happened sets in motion a terrifying chain of events.
Musician and filmmaker Flying Lotus seems to appreciate old-school survival horror video games, as Ash follows that template to an admirable degree but is ultimately sluggish and dull. Eiza Gonzalez’s Riya awakens on a spaceship with no recollection of how or why the rest of her crew is dead. The film splices in the occasional graphic image of someone’s face melting (a gnarly visual effect) to set expectations, but the majority consists of watching Riya stumble around and inspecting the ship in blue/purple-soaked lighting, desperately trying to do some heavy lifting to make the vibes scary.
Ash is striving for that eerie atmosphere of Dead Space (there are numerous small visual cues bringing this to mind, not to mention being stranded in a ship on an unknown planet where a protagonist is suffering from amnesia) by way of Resident Evil, which is a tantalizing approach for a horror movie. The issue is that those games have, well, gameplay breaking up the monotony of walking around dark corridors alongside world-building through notes or audio logs.
This is not to say the film needed Riya fighting for her life against zombies or some other type of monstrous creature or for her to solve bizarre puzzles operating on video game logic, but that it needed something beyond a slow-burning, lifeless investigation into the ship or vague details about their mission and the planet her team was setting out to colonize. Even the nonviolent flashbacks have nothing interesting to explain about these characters, their relationship dynamics, or the mission.
One might assume the material might perk up substantially once Riya comes across Aaron Paul’s Brian, who had been watching over her team from a different vessel, noticed everything went to hell, and is now trying to help both of them escape. The issue here is that the screenplay from Jonni Remmler (which already isn’t that hard to deduce what’s happening) sets up other predictable narrative avenues. Slowly, Riya’s memories start coming back, some of which include a mildly exciting brawl with crew member Adhi (bonafide badass Iko Uwais, so you know the fight choreography is worthwhile), except Brian starts to wonder if such a thing would be suitable for her mental state and their goal of escaping.
None of this is helped by the stilted acting, which often feels like these two otherwise talented actors were taking lessons from whoever was coaching those rough performances in early 90s Capcom survival horror games. The screenplay itself doesn’t give them much to work with, primarily consisting of dialogue, forcing them to talk in circles about nothing until it’s time for all secrets to be revealed.
Those last 20 minutes offer flashback violence and largely unsatisfying answers. To be clear, video games are not the only medium Ash is lousily cribbing from. Flying Lotus simply has no idea what to do with any of these influences.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
