Fresh on Space… MADNESS Theater is Ash (now on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a stylish sci-fi scarefest from director Flying Lotus. The film is essentially a two-hander starring Eiza Gonzalez (3 Body Problem) and Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) as interstellar travelers marooned on a distant planet, trying to figure out how they got there and how to get the hell back off. Lotus is best known as a multi-hyphenate artist with a significant music-biz career who branched off into filmmaking with 2017 Shudder exclusive Kuso, followed by some short films (one made the cut for V/H/S/99) and then Ash, which stirred some cult-level interest with an SXSW debut and brief national theatrical run. Whether the movie exhibits some substance beneath its style is what we’re exploring here today.
ASH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Ash opens with images of melting and/or exploding faces, which is one hell of a reverse-Raiders of the Lost Ark maneuver. They seem like hallucinations or bad dreams, and they might be, as Riya (Gonzalez) awakens on the floor of a spaceship to all the stuff of an interstellar mission that’s gone terribly awry: Flickering lights, dead bodies, blood on her hands, amnesia, the overhead-P.A. ship’s computer delivering warning messages in a calm voice that, par for the sci-fi movie course, sounds at least 35 percent like Sigourney Weaver, so consider a couple of her very famous movies officially invoked.
This particular semi-malfunctioning Sigourneyish voice sounds like it needs a lozenge as it bleats Not Good messages. “Security system breached,” “abnormal activity detected,” etc. And we’re all like, computer, please define “abnormal activity,” but it doesn’t, because what fun would it be to have Riya not wander through the ship, subjecting herself to jump scares, be they nightmarish flashes of memory or gruesome reveals hinting at what happened to the rest of her very much unalive crew? She walks outside to stare at the kaleidoscopic purple sky, but soon realizes that the atmosphere isn’t quite amenable to human lungs. She claws her way back and puts a little medical patch on her neck and breathes a sigh of relief.
We’re privy to a flashback featuring Riya and the rest of the crew (Iko Uwais, Kate Elliott, Beulah Koale and Lotus), who celebrate finding this planet, informally dubbed Ash, for its potential human colonization. Other missions weren’t nearly as successful, so hooray for Our Crew, but considering most of them are corpses now, maybe the toast was a bit premature. Riya keeps pseudo-remembering fragments of things, and they’re all rather violent and awful, some involving a rather sharp kitchen knife. She just can’t piece together what happened, but soon realizes that one of her coworkers is AWOL, and might be alive somewhere.
This is about when Brion (Paul) knocks on the door. He says he got a distress call about someone on the ship having a psychotic break. But Riya isn’t sure if she believes or trusts him, and vice-versa. I mean, we can’t help but wonder if Riya is responsible for the murders, so he’s surely of a similar mind. The film sticks to her POV, and we soon begin to wonder about the nature of reality, and whether she’s seeing what’s truly there or if she’s hallucinating, or what. The two of them agree that they should find their missing compadre and then get the heck off this rock. And since they’re running out of oxygen and there’s only a brief window during which they can escape the planet’s atmosphere, they’re up against a ticking clock. It’s all rather tense, and Brion knows it. “We’re all dealing with some pretty meteoric shit right now!” he exclaims, and I think that’s a metaphor, not a literalism.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Ash is indebted to a couple all-timers in Alien (and another pretty good one from the franchise, Prometheus) and Carpenter’s The Thing, a not-so-all-timer in Enemy Mine, and a few more recent genre touchstones like Moon, The Martian and Sunshine. Oh, and it also does for nostrils what Wrath of Khan did for yer earholes.
Performance Worth Watching: This is as good a place as any for a shout-out to whoever conceptualized the comic-relief automated medical-exam machine that comes off like the spiritual successor to Japanese talking toilets, since it chirps perky messages despite doling out bad news about your dead crewmates.
Memorable Dialogue: Riya, decontextualized: “F— your existence!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Lotus shows significant vision with Ash, albeit a clearly budget-limited looks-shitty-but-it’s-still-pretty-cool vision that seems as inspired by video games (Dead Space comes to mind) as it is by sci-fi/horror cinema classics. The inside of the ship is rich in practical design, and outside it is a conglomeration of green screen/CG effects that might look better after a visit to the weed dispensary. The struggle is to feel immersed in it instead of consistently conscious of the blatant contrast between a real human being and the artificial background behind it.
None of this is a gamebreaker, mind you. But the screenplay’s scattered assortment of cliches and all-too-familiarities doesn’t give us much fodder to inspire our emotional investment. Chopped up with messy flashbacks, the narrative is full of tired Alienisms and psychedelic diversions that feel like strategic contrivances gussying up a yawnworthy narrative of deadline-countdowns, painfully slow strolls through mood lighting and an is-it-real-or-am-I-just-crazy biohazard-brain plot. We’re not sure if we can trust Brion or, after a while, the perspective of our protagonist, which renders the story too loose and smudgy for its own good.
Lotus composes a succulently synthy score that enlivens the proceedings, but the partially realized story – light on character and detail – sometimes feels like it was built around the music, with mini music videos dropped into the middle of the story, bogging it down and cutting into its suspenseful momentum. It takes 35 minutes for Ash to get interesting, and another 40 after that before Lotus finds his inner Cronenberg and makes a wily, interesting mess. But by then, it’s too little too late.
Our Call: Ash might work for some, especially if your bong is more than just a conversation piece. But Lotus needs a stronger screenplay, and doesn’t quite lean into the film’s aesthetic or exercise its intellect enough to draw in the teetotalers. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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