In the sci-fi-horror film Ash, an ethnically and geographically diverse group of astronauts is dispatched to the farthest corners of the galaxy as Earth’s last hope. They’ve been entrusted with finding a new home suitable for repopulation as their old one is in its death throes, suffering under ecological disaster. Yet something has gone horribly wrong: having landed their spaceship on an alien planet, the entire crew — save our “final girl” — has been massacred aboard the vessel. Afflicted with amnesia, our surviving character has only spotty recollections of what happened, but is consumed with the belief that the crew was overtaken by contamination and that nobody was who they seemed. Paranoia takes hold, which is only exacerbated when another astronaut, who was supposedly dispatched on a long-range mission, returns to the ship looking for answers. Can they be trusted? Can our heroine even trust herself?
Ash was written and directed by hip-hop/electronic artist Flying Lotus (who previously directed the 2017 horror-comedy anthology Kuso, credited under simply his actual first name, Steve), and if that summary sounds as though it’s been cobbled together from plot points of widely beloved titles, you’re not imagining things. In an analogy which is a little too on the nose, the filmmaker is sampling elements from — to name just a handful of obvious influences — Alien, Sunshine, The Thing, Event Horizon, Interstellar, and High Tension, and remixed them into something less than the sum of its parts. The filmmaker has effectively outsourced the plot, characters, dialogue, and themes to his forebears and betters, while expending all of his creative energies on conceiving of trippy-looking digital landscapes, bathing scenes in magenta and blue lighting, delivering retro-futuristic production design, layering digital distortions and drones on the soundtrack, and giving audiences face-melting gore FX (which, in this instance, is more descriptive than hyperbolic). Fittingly, the ideal version of this film is projected onto a giant screen behind a couple of turntables, serving as visual accompaniment for an EDM set where the familiarity of it all would be an asset. Ash is best intermittently glanced at while otherwise engaged on the dancefloor, perhaps under the influence of some designer drugs. Which is to say, rapt attention does not work in the film’s favor.
The audience’s surrogate is Riya (Eiza González), who awakens on her ship to most of her colleagues lying dead in pools of their own blood, their bodies broken and the integrity of their state-of-the-art liferaft compromised. Riya herself is bruised and bloodied, sporting a nasty cut on her forehead which may explain her short-term memory loss, although she keeps having traumatic flashes of being attacked by her fellow crew members, who include friend-with-benefits Kevin (Beulah Koale) and Adhi (Iko Uwais of The Raid films, whose involvement writes a check the film is incapable of cashing). The air outside the ship is toxic — not that that stops Riya from wandering around in the elements for several minutes without her helmet on — and the craft is venting life-sustaining oxygen. Millions of miles from civilization or rescue, she appears to be well and truly fucked, until she hears a loud banging coming from outside the airlock door. After preemptively attacking this visitor in a spacesuit, Riya comes to realize this individual is Brian (Aaron Paul), a team member who’s been gone for months as part of orbital monitoring of the planet’s surface from space, responding to the ship’s distress beacon. Riya’s still pretty iffy on details, but Brian seems to understand more about the mission and makeup of the crew than even she does, and he helpfully knows his way around the med bay; slapping narcotizing patches on her to help with her fever and running a “Mobile Diagnostic and Surgery” device which is able to perform automated operations accompanied by chipper Japanese instructions and 8-bit chimes. Brian’s escape craft is a few kilometers away and there’s only a narrow window in which they can leave the planet and link up with the mothership, so he advises they rest up just long enough to then make the voyage back to his ship. But Riya can’t let go of the belief that the crew was riddled with infection of unknown origin and that one member of her team (Kate Elliott’s Clarke) is still missing and may either be in danger or a threat to their escape, notions that Brian is a little too quick to dismiss.
It’s been said that one of the hardest things to direct well is two actors sitting at a table having a conversation; there are very few ways to make it visually interesting, and a thousand small ways you can anesthetize the viewer with what amounts to an exposition dump. This is something that comes to mind while watching Ash, which may be the work of a promising visual artist but probably not a real filmmaker. It’s too easy to spot where Flying Lotus does and does not engage with the subject matter. A dream sequence finds Riya awaking in fields of rust-colored grain dressed like African royalty while sunlight streams through the treetops; it’s handsome-looking in the way a perfume commercial might be, but it signifies nothing and is entirely tangential to the film around it. Same with the protrusions on the spacesuits worn by the characters, where the assorted see-through compartments are lit up in an unnatural green glow while revealing what appear to be parts of the suit-wearer’s skeleton underneath. If nothing else, it’s a nice change of pace from the homogeneity and function-first approach to costume design in the genre. The same can be said of the film’s true star, the aforementioned surgery-bot, which is presented the way Japanese toilets often are in animated sitcoms, complete with morbid animations accompanying post-mortems that offer “sorry for your loss” condolences and on-screen prompts asking you to rate your experience. Collectively, it’s a bunch of intriguing visual concepts and gnarly prosthetics of the sort that used to get splashy, palate-whetting layouts in Fangoria Magazine, but there’s scarcely a film around them.
When confronted with the fundamentals, Ash lurches from scene to scene with little sense of urgency — and that’s in spite of introducing multiple ticking clock devices — while struggling to convey basic story information; the film is stymied by simply getting from point A to point B. Instead, it resorts to mind-melds, omnipotent narration, and a cascade of flashbacks to previously unseen events, which is especially frustrating as many of the films it’s stealing from are models of narrative economy. And then there’s the very nature of Paul’s character, which involves one of the more hackneyed tropes in all of modern cinema (if you’re up on New French Extremity, you’ve likely already guessed it). Ash resides in a regrettable middleground between pure abstraction and the heady low-budget DIY digital effect of the sort practiced by Benson & Morehead and a janky B-movie that’s still spinning up new plot complications deep into its second act. The film is torn between its two masters, never completely abandoning one for the other, while also never reconciling the two mostly incompatible modes. The whole project suffers from music video brain, prioritizing sizzle over steak and flash over coherence. Yet for all its overtures to “vibes” and putting “cool shit” on screen, there’s very little visual or narrative flow to Ash. It has the outer shape of something fun, but all the parts inside are assembled incorrectly.
DIRECTOR: Flying Lotus; CAST: Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais, Kate Elliot; DISTRIBUTOR: RLJE Films/Shudder; IN THEATERS: March 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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