Riya Ortiz wakes up in a desolate space station. Red warning lights flash, ominous automated messages call out from the station’s computer. Then the bodies. Bodies everywhere. These were friends, co-workers, maybe lovers. Now they are silent, covered in blood, obvious victims of brutal violence, how how? Why? Is the danger still present, or is it passed? As the ship’s life support systems begin to falter, Riya is determined to discover the truth, but will she find it before something lurking in the shadows finds her? This is the setup for musician/filmmaker Flying Lotus’s sophomore feature, Ash, and if it sounds familiar, it should.
Following up his scatologically obsessed debut film, Kuso, Flying Lotus returns to the director’s chair – and makes his on camera debut – in Ash, a space horror film loaded down with obvious influences that it is trying desperately to outrun. With a cast led by Eiza González as Riya and Aaron Paul as her shifty crewmate, Brion, Ash marks Flying Lotus’s first genuine narrative feature, and while it is beautifully directed, it seems a little sheepish about striking out into uncharted territory, preferring to stay in a zone that has been pretty well mined over the last sixty plus years.
Much of the film takes place in flashbacks, with Riya – who has lost much of her memory as it pertains to why she’s stuck on a space station alone – gradually experiences flashes of her recent past. Through these we meet her fellow crewmates, Kevin (Beulah Koale), Davis (Flying Lotus), the headstrong Clarke (Kate Elliott), and Adhi (Iko Uwais). She appears to be on some sort of exploratory mission, though its exact impetus is still foggy. It isn’t until the remote member of the crew, Brion, reappears after she awakes to her bloody nightmare that full scope becomes clear, and her situation worsens.
Experiencing Ash at times feels like watching a YouTube play along of something like Dead Space or Alien: Isolation, first person video games in which the player is tasked with exploring a ship decimated by some unknown tragedy to uncover clues about its origin. It’s not a bad thing, but it is perhaps a bit too familiar at times. Thankfully, Flying Lotus seems to understand these comparisons are inevitable and injects new elements and scares that feel very unique to his vision.
This being a Flying Lotus film, it almost goes without saying that the visual and aural elements are among the film’s most exciting pieces. The planet, Ash, feels very influenced by Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, and in turn, the first two Alien films; desolate, inhospitable, unpredictable, but also mesmerizing in its beauty.
As Riya slowly regains her memory, she experiences nightmarish images of bodies doing things bodies should not do. Faces melt, insides come out; and the screams… on the screams. This is perhaps where Lotus’s imagination really finds purchase in the story. The creature design and effects are top notch, at times recalling the work of the great Douglas Trumbull in Silent Running and 2001: A Space Odyssey, then quickly morphing to the flashes of hell that punctuate Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon, only here, Lotus lingers just a fraction of a second longer than you would expect, allowing the imagery to seep into the audience’s consciousness, building anticipation for a reveal that is not entirely what one would expect.
A potent mix of space horror, action, science fiction, and good, old-fashioned gooey blood-letting, Ash is definitely not the most original story, but it is solid in its execution, with just enough visual panache to keep it interesting. Production design and art direction are incredible here, as one would expect from Lotus, but I was really impressed with some of the costume and creature design as well. It is tough to deliver something original these days, and while that doesn’t really happen with Ash’s plot or character work, it is impossible to deny that the film is visually engaging. Though not exactly surprising, Ash is nevertheless compelling to watch, just make sure you see it in a theater where the experience can really pummel and overwhelm you. That is cinema.