Cosmic Horror Gets a Creepy Lo-Fi Spin With Ash
There’s something here.
When Riya (a steely Eiza Gonzalez) wakes up, bloodied and disoriented, in an empty space station, she doesn’t even remember her own name. As she stumbles through the destroyed station, alarms blaring, all she finds are the terribly mutilated corpses of her crewmates, slaughtered in an apparently violent struggle. When Riya ventures outside the station, she’s engulfed in dust that makes it almost impossible to see, if it weren’t for the awe-inspiring cosmic lights that illuminate a shadowy figure standing in the distance. She waves, and it waves back, as if mimicking her actions. Is it an illusion? A creature native to this planet? She doesn’t have much time to ponder this, as she stumbles back to the station and tries to stop the stabbing pain in her head that is accompanied by terrifying visions of her crewmates’ faces, screaming before melting into terrifyingly inhuman shapes.
The entirety of Ash, the debut feature film from composer-rapper-DJ multihyphenate Flying Lotus, follows Riya just like this, as she pieces together the puzzle of who she is and what happened on that space station. It plays out much like a video game — we wake up with Riya, rummage through the station, and look for clues: a bloody knife there, a hazmat suit here. The nightmarish visions of her crewmates still plague her, but so do brief flashes of her memories of them, eating at the canteen and chatting. But Riya’s investigation into her recent past is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Brion (Aaron Paul, wonderfully opaque), a man who claims to be her fellow crewmate and had been manning the orbital around the planet when he received a distress call from their space station. Riya is uncertain whether she can trust him, but she becomes more uncertain as to whether she can trust herself, as the flashes of her memories start to reveal she may not have been so innocent in the massacre of her crewmates.
Ash treads the familiar territory of many psychological sci-fi horror films that came before it, namely the most iconic blueprint of them all: Alien. We’ve got the claustrophobic corridors, the grimy pipes and frayed wiring of a lived-in space station, and the typical crew of misfits, not to mention Eiza Gonzalez in some blood-stained tank tops that are a tad too flattering. But what elevates Ash from being just another run-of-the-mill low-budget Alien knockoff are the dashes of cosmic horror that Flying Lotus sprinkles throughout the film.
The hellish visions that Riya keeps experiencing invoke a feeling of Lovecraftian dread not unlike Paul Anderson’s disturbing Event Horizon (with some gore to match), while the brief glimpses we get of the alien planet — nicknamed Ash — are surreal and awe-inspiring. It’s the planet’s landscape that make Ash such an intriguing new entry in the cosmic horror genre — Flying Lotus and his team have managed to craft a truly otherworldly vision of an alien planet, filled with skies that are deep shades of purple and hazy yellow lights that hint at something strange and inexplicable. Ash, whose official planetary designation is KOI-442, is the only planet that Riya and Brion’s exploratory expedition found that already has the atmosphere to support human life, with a few adjustments. If only the planet didn’t have mysterious wells scattered across the surface, which seemed to have been placed by other entities long before they arrived.
It’s the planet Ash, and the importance it holds to humankind’s existence, that serves as the ticking time bomb to Riya’s journey. As she continues to unravel the mystery of her crewmates’ murders, Brion insists that she abandon her investigation and serve the “purpose” of her oddly ambiguous expedition. They must leave the planet immediately with the technology they discovered, or perish — and the window of time they have is shortening.
Ash’s alien planet is painted in deep purple hues that feel truly otherworldly.
It’s these handful of mysteries, along with some classic horror jumpscares, that keep Ash moving along at a brisk pace and stretch out the somewhat standard script by Jonni Remmler. With his debut feature, Flying Lotus shows that he already has a strong visual style, playing with video game-inspired POV shots and overhead shots that keep every frame dynamic, even if it’s a corridor we’ve seen a dozen times before. He’s clearly a very energized director — something that keeps a slim narrative like Ash’s entertaining — but might take away from the slow-burning dread that he was so expertly building in the first half. By the time the film gets to its terrifically goopy third act, you don’t much mind.
Ash can sometimes feel small due to its limited locations and its standard script. But its breathtakingly otherworldly visuals and smattering of Lovecraftian dread makes it an intriguing new entry into the cosmic horror genre — and one that you won’t forget anytime soon.
