Review: Ash

Director:  Flying Lotus

Stars:  Iko Uwais, Eiza González, Aaron Paul

After a stint as a guest director on one of the recent V/H/S instalments (who can distinguish one from another now?), IDM veteran Flying Lotus returns with his second feature film; a modestly scaled cosmic horror effort bathed in his own synthwave-adjacent soundscapes and flooded in the kind of neon hues that makes Nicolas Winding Refn and Panos Cosmatos weak at the knees.

Initially redolent of sci-fi horror yarns like Christian Alvart’s pulpy 2009 flick Pandorum, Ash throws us in at the deep-end with an amnesiac protagonist who awakes in the midst of an emergency. Riya (Eiza González) wakes on the floor of her quarters aboard the 7F spacecraft to find the rest of her crew wiped out in some unknown bloody carnage. The only initial clues we have are the barrage of body horror images that flash in her mind in harsh psychedelic bursts. It transpires that the 7F is part of a colonisation mission, and has landed on potential settlement planet KOI442, monikered ‘Ash’. As medical patches revive scattered memories of her former crewmates Clarke (Kate Elliott), Adhi (Iko Uwais) and her beau Kevin (Beulah Koale), paranoia settles in that Riya herself might be responsible for whatever went so seriously awry.

Companionship arrives in the form of Brion (Aaron Paul), emissary from an orbiting station who can only take-off or land within certain time windows. When the pair uncover a depletion in the remaining oxygen supply, Brion insists that they must take advantage of the next rapidly-approaching exit window, but Riya wants to learn more about the dark mysteries surrounding her.

Ash opens strong with it’s sense of claustrophobic unease and the furtive promise of the central mystery, and if nothing else it bows out in maximalist style as the final twenty minutes sees Lotus throwing all manner of gloopy effects at us. The midsection is a trudge, however, and reveals rather conspicuously the limitations of the budget that are written into Jonni Remmler’s often derivative screenplay. Uninspired production design means that the 7F looks sorta kinda like any spacecraft from TV, while the action mostly pauses for talky melodramatic interplay in a two-hander between González and Paul.

A protagonist and a lone compadre is almost a trope, now. Familiar enough to have us second guessing the twists and turns that Ash has up it’s sleeve. At it’s most ambitious it might see itself as an evolution of Solaris, but it’s as reminiscent of Moon or even Adam Sandler’s Spaceman in it’s rather tepid coasting on the tensions between our lead and her unreliable saviour. All these years later it’s hard not to see Jesse Pinkman in an Aaron Paul performance. González fares better. She’s certainly game for the range of action and dramatic responses called of Riya for the duration of the movie, but she also feels like a particular type of sci-fi heroine that’s been perpetually remixed ever since the birth of Ripley in Alien.

Ash feels indebted, also, to the subgenre of survival horror video games, even Alien: Isolation. Lotus pivots to a first person POV on several occasions, and sets up mini-missions for Riya and Brion to accomplish. All of these influences swirl around in Ash, making it feel like a bit of a half-baked daydream conjured up after a weed-addled marathon of genre favourites and gaming on somebody’s couch. That’s not a bad thing, per se. Lotus is proficient enough to hit the beats he’s aiming for, but it’s all a comfortable mishmash of the familiar. So much so that, by the end, when the unsurprising truth is revealed and it streamlines to a mostly dialogue-free battle for survival, the first hour feels like an overlong preamble to the grisly, over-extended music video that is the finale.

At least the soundtrack is fire enough to keep us buzzing through a showdown of appreciable gnarly effects – both practical and digital – as we speed-run Flying Lotus’ incredulous final level. Indeed, despite not adhering to a found footage format, Ash does come to feel like a V/H/S segment that’s run long. Perhaps because, after all that dallying in the mid-section, there’s very little depth to what’s going on, just a gleeful genre flex that leaves nothing behind in it’s slipstream.