‘Ash’: The Sci-Fi Horror Film Moviegoers Have Been Waiting For

For his sophomore directorial effort, rapper/DJ/producer Flying Lotus channels his love of all things sci-fi and horror into Ash. Now in theaters, it’s a trippy and monstrous amalgam of the genre’s best video games (Dead Space, Resident Evil) and movies (Event Horizon, The Thing, and of course Alien, whom it slyly references with its title).

Thankfully, derivation doesn’t breed dullness, as the multihyphenate’s feature is a beautifully gnarly and hallucinatory survival tale whose enveloping atmosphere of cosmic doom and madness more than makes up for its narrative conventionality. Also borrowing from 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountain, it’s a hypnotic star child of out-there wonder and internal corruption and chaos.

Riya (Eiza González) wakes on the floor in a space station illuminated by spastically flickering lights, an automated loudspeaker message announcing that system failure has occurred, abnormal activity has been detected, and a reboot is necessary. Dazed and confused, Riya exits her cabin to discover blood on the walls and floor which lead to the slumped corpse of an apparent comrade.

She pulls a knife out of this body’s chest and proceeds ahead, turning on the facility’s backup power and coming across an additional cadaver in a space suit, its visor catastrophically smashed. She exits the building to walk along a rocky alien landscape where ash falls from a sky awash in stars and enormous, swirling multi-colored clouds. For a moment, she thinks she sees a figure in the gloom, mimicking her movements like a reflection. It vanishes before she can make contact, and she subsequently races back inside before suffocating.

Riya’s memory flashes indicate that something terribly wrong has taken place, and the confused and panicked look in her eyes suggests that she has no recollection of it. Thus Ash establishes its typical video game-y set up, with its amnesiac protagonist slowly trying to piece together the preceding events.

Flying Lotus’ introductory montage of a vortex of exploding hues, Gonzalez’s terrified visage, and melting faces underline the unholiness of Riya’s predicament, while a brief, lucid rewind to happier times reveals that she’s on a mission to the far reaches of the galaxy with crew members Kevin (Beulah Koale), Clarke (Kate Elliott), Davis (Flying Lotus), and Adhi (The Raid’s Iko Uwais). All of them were excited that the planet on which they landed appears to have a close-to-breathable atmosphere. Moreover, they doubt, with a measure of pride, that their fellow travelers (whoever they are) have been as successful.

Using a flashlight to traverse an interstellar outpost that’s been ravaged by some malevolent entity, Riya struggles to recall who she is and what she’s doing here. Answers arrive in the form of Brion (Aaron Paul), a stranger whom she promptly attacks, only to hear that he’s a fellow crew member.

Brion has come from the orbital satellite hovering above the planet, and is responding to an SOS call Riya supposedly made. Though she’s already self-medicated with high-tech therapeutic patches which affix to her neck, Riya is treated by a medical robot as Brion explains the nature of their situation: They’re the seventh and last vessel sent from Earth to find a colonizable new home for humanity, and the only way off this planet is by traveling to the orbital—which they can’t do until everything properly lines up again.

Sleep and conversation, alas, do little to clear the cobwebs from Riya’s noggin, as she’s routinely beset by harrowing visions of gory countenances and murderous conduct, some of it seen from her own point-of-view—implying, unsurprisingly, that she may have been responsible for the carnage.

Ash plays by such a familiar rulebook that it’s difficult to be outright surprised by its revelations, most of which have been borrowed (and ever-so-slightly tweaked) from its ancestors. Even so, Flying Lotus knows how to jar with a sudden cut to hellish images and freakish sounds, and his score—equal parts lovely and nightmarish, tranquil and oppressively cacophonous—helps create a mood of dawning apocalyptic dread, as if the entire galaxy were at any moment going to come crashing down on Riya—or, perhaps, open wide to suck her up and swallow her whole.

Ash tethers its eclectic soundscape to a bevy of spectacular Heavy Metal-esque panoramas of burning suns, consuming mist, impenetrable darkness, and brilliant flares. The film is consistently breathtaking, and led by the striking Gonzalez as a frazzled explorer determined to decipher her role in an enigmatic cataclysm.

Navigating dark corridors and cramped ventilation shafts, Riya is a quasi-Ellen Ripley whose determination is undercut by her mental instability and whose strength is, according to flashbacks in which she fights her devilishly maniacal and vicious cohorts, considerable. Ever since Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Gonzalez has radiated a magnetism that suggested impending A-list movie stardom, and here, she cuts a strong sci-fi heroine figure, with Paul equally sturdy as her sole living partner—even if Brion invariably comes off as an untrustworthy character.

A bizarre dream sequence in which Riya, in a bright forest, wears a furry dress and a necklace across her nose boasts a vague Dune flavor, while a fleeting snapshot of Riya lying in bed as Kevin plays the trumpet, his shadow stark against the wall, has a noir-ish vibe.

Flying Lotus amalgamates freely, including with a conclusion that shouts out to John Carpenter’s icy 1982 classic. Still, the director remixes skillfully, and his personal flourishes are by and large haunting, including the sight of tornados of smoke and electricity emerging from enormous techno-wells in the ground to coalesce in the heavens to form a gaping whirlpool of annihilating proportions.

Flying Lotus is a rehash that taps deeply into the veins of its beloved genre masters, delivering an experience that’s at once routine and rousing. This is the trick performed by so many stellar B-movies, and Flying Lotus demonstrates sincere affection for not only his source materials’ storytelling devices but also their spellbinding psychosis and brutal bleakness.

To seek knowledge about the universe or oneself is to court insanity and disaster, and the film follows through on that dispiriting idea to its evocative end, complete with a mid-credits stinger that murders any happily ever after. Gruesome, cynical, and deeply sinister, it’s a scream in space worth hearing.