Ash is what you'd get if Ridley Scott's enduring classic Alien, Brandon Cronenberg's recent body horror gem Possessor, and the visceral video game Dead Space had a truly nightmarish xenomorph baby together. Unfortunately, the film is not nearly as exciting as that sounds. The latest from the musician/producer-turned-director Flying Lotus, it's such a mishmash of reference points that it struggles to bring together into a compelling whole. This isn't always a problem, as the film is intentionally fragmented and consistently splits itself apart just as the doomed characters trapped in it do. However, it starts to grow repetitive in how it loops back on itself. When it then proceeds to awkwardly spell out its central misdirect and repeatedly beat us over the head with what happened, it drains the life out of the more maximalist visuals with which it bombards viewers.
The premise is a familiar one. Ash follows the troubled Riya as she finds herself alone on a spaceship that is now stranded on a faraway planet. Something has gone terribly awry. She is trying to remember how her fellow crew members all ended up dead — with consistent bursts of violence flashing in her mind — but something seems to be stopping her from doing so. Though played well enough by Eiza González (The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), who proves that she can more than lead a film all her own, the writing by Jonni Remmler reduces Riya to being a one-note character who mostly exists to look confused about what is going on. This will continue with the arrival of Brion, played by a stranded Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), who says that he had received a distress signal and came down from the communication buoy hovering above the planet to try to help them. He wants to flee, but she is drawn to piecing together what it is she can't remember.
With the duo bathed in reds to blues as they wander the ship to Flying Lotus' pulsating score, one is tempted to compare Ash more to music videos than other movies. However, if anything, leaning more into the sensory and emotional rather than the mystery would've been an intriguing path for Ash to go down. For all the bursts of nightmarish gore that invade Riya's mind, it's the moments in between this where the film starts to stall and undercut itself. Without giving anything away, it's abundantly clear what happened from the jump based on how Riya remembers violent encounter after violent encounter. And yet, Ash is frustratingly fixated on making sure we come away knowing exactly what it was that went down.
This leaves no room for the visuals and the disquieting uncertainty to get under our skin. The film can't get out of its own head. It robs not only the reveals of any impact — as it holds our hand through its painfully obvious unveiling — but it reduces the often striking imagery to feeling like cutscenes from a video game. As it drags us back through Riya's memory, the thing you end up predominantly feeling is weariness at it all. That a work which looks as consistently nightmarish as this can manage to feel frequently tedious is almost impressive, though it's still hard to shake the sense that we're watching an interesting but scattered cover of a sci-fi film we've already seen many times before. When it cuts into the mind of Riya near the end to see what has made its home there, what comes pouring out is blood, not ideas Ash can call its own.
Ash
Rated R
Directed by Flying Lotus
Starring Eiza González, Aaron Paul
