Monday, May 5, 2025

Ash

Ash

Though it doesn't quite separate itself from its influences, Ash demonstrates Flying Lotus' creative potential as a filmmaker.

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Flying Lotus is hard to pin down. As a musician, Flying Lotus has produced seven studio length albums that weave in and out of genres like jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, and funk. As a producer he's gone in directions folks might expect (i.e. producing much of fellow lofi funk enthusiast Thundercat's albums), while also producing tracks for some of hip-hop's best known artists including Kendrick Lamar, Mac Miller and Danny Brown. As a filmmaker, Lotus has demonstrated a strong affection for the horror genre including a body horror/comedy anthology movie called Kuso and a segment in V/H/S franchise. So what did he put together for a feature length film? It looks like he went in the sci-fi horror direction.

The Setup

The movie opens with an astronaut Riya (Eiza González) waking up in a haze with no memories of what happened. Which is more than a bit troubling because the rest of her crew are all dead after being horrifically murdered. So when a man named Brion arrives (Aaron Paul), Riya will have to sort out what happened and whether the man in front of her is friend or foe...

Ash is a difficult movie for me to review. Not because it's terrible or I don't have things to say about it. It's because discussing the biggest issues this movie has requires a slight spoiler. So what I'm going to do, is address what I can without diving into any spoilers, and then dive into slight spoiler territory to explain my reaction to this movie.

So right off the bat, there's a lot about this movie that impresses me. I like the Mandy-esque phantasmagoric visual palette applied to a science fiction movie, considering that the genre is best known for making it's horror iterations look/feel sterile with gross creeping in from the outside. Instead everything in this movie is in darkly lit purples and reds with deep blacks. It gives the whole movie a visually oppressive and nervous look that's only amplified when we go into the spacesuit POV shots and the lighting is reduced even further. There's also moments of visual flair when we pan up to the atmosphere or engage with the mind-altering elements of the story that stand out, again in a genre that tends to avoid dream-like imagery. It means that when the movie does get more into its grimy standouts, the violent payoffs feel perfectly in line with the existing visuals.

And as much as this movie wearing its influences on its sleeve hinders it down the line, the pulsing synth score, also by Flying Lotus, captures the blend of tension, frenetic action and wonder, beautifully. It's also awesome to see actors known more for their physicality like martial arts legend Iko Uwais get to just act. 

Premise wise I like the inversion of the common sci-fi trope, which is trying to piece the pieces together by looking backwards, with heavy implications about what did happen, that the movie can embrace and invert in equal measure. That being said, this is also where being a giant movie buff played against the film, so now it's light spoiler time.

Slight Spoilers Ahead

Based on the dead bodies everywhere and Riya's sporadic flashbacks of violence, it's pretty clear that Riya had a direct hand in what happened to her comrades, even if she's not sure what it is. The general idea with a premise like this is that nothing is what it first appears to be, so the lingering mystery the movie is poking at is "what made Riya turn violent against her friends?"

And once you see Riya and company poking around an alien planet in spacesuits when they come across an organism, that everyone says to leave alone, but Riya doesn't listen, everything starts to fall into place. This is an Alien/The Thing riff. Somehow this thing got onboard and either took over and turned everyone against each other. 

Admittedly there's a lot of fun design choices and personality differences that makes this work a touch better than it should, more on this later. However when we've got our hero taking blow torch to a monstrous alien entity that wants to assimilate or kill Riya, it's hard not to see the two movies Flying Lotus watched before writing this movie just spilling out into this one.

Which is a shame because I think this overlap in action and premise with the other movies, distracts from Ash's most intriguing ideas which center around identity. Riya introduces herself to another character, after the lion's share of action has gone down, as wanting to piece together what happened and who she is. And paired with an entity that wants to make Riya a part of it, there's a lot of fun ideas we could play with concerning identity like, are you the sum of your actions, are you inherently you no matter what, are you still you if you're overtaken by some kind of X-Men techno organic parasite? 

These are complicated, metaphysical questions the movie seems less interested in that monsters in spacesuits slamming into each other.

That said, there's a ton of promise here and leaning into genre tropes is hardly a lethal fault.

The Verdict: Familiar But With A Lot of Creative Flair

Though it doesn't quite separate itself from its influences, Ash demonstrates Flying Lotus' creative potential as a filmmaker. 6/10

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