SXSW 2025 Review:
"Ash"
Release Date: March 21, 2025 Rating: R Running Time: 95 minutes Much about Ash will be familiar to longtime or even casual fans of sci-fi horror. The setting: a barren planet ripe for terraforming. The premise: the surviving crew members of a remote space station must battle an unknown enemy while trying to find a way off the planet. The adversary: possibly alien in origin. On paper, the sophomore directorial effort of musician Flying Lotus—a.k.a. Steven Ellison—is a by-the-numbers mash-up of Alien and The Thing. But in execution, Ash’s ambitions exceed its B-movie plot and budget. Flying Lotus turns a nightmare scenario and into a dream-like exercise in lost memory recovery replete with haunting imagery and a hypnotic electronic score by the musician turned filmmaker. Set on the titular planet, so-called because of the granular material found in the air and on the surface, Ash opens with Eiza González’s Riya waking up to find most of her fellow space station operatives dead. Riya cannot remember what happened, but all evidence points to one crew member losing it and turning on her colleagues. Eiza realizes there are two other survivors: suspected murderer Clarke (Kate Elliott) and astronaut Brion (Aaron Paul), who has left his orbiting spacecraft to return to Ash to investigate Riya’s distress call. Of course, nothing is what it seems, and Riya must piece everything together as she begins to recall the events that led to the killing spree. Flying Lotus, who appears briefly as one of the crew members Riya finds slain, allows Ash to unfold in slow but entrancing fashion. He embraces flashbacks—mostly shot from Riya’s point of view—to tell a harrowing tale fueled by paranoia and desperate self-preservation. Fast, fleeting, and disorientating cut-ins suggest the survivors are not alone on Ash. The neon-lit space station and the hazy exterior of Ash lends a psychedelic quality to the film, which heightens the mystery and danger that envelopes Riya. Flying Lotus also commits himself to ensuring even the equipment and the technology deployed in Ash captures the eye, from computerized medical devices to biomechanical-like spacesuits to the space station’s inner workings. The impressively gory prosthetic effects justify Ash’s third-act excursion into body horror. Receiving her first true opportunity to carry a film, González is regrettably required to remain in reactive mode for much of Ash as Riya struggles with her lost memories. But she handles herself adroitly in the multiple brawls she gets into. Paul is more of a presence than a costar to González. Indonesian action star and undisputed fan favorite Iko Uwais continues his unlucky streak of being cast in English-language films that do not know what to do his talents. His big fight scene is shoddily shot from Riya’s point of view. Unfortunately, Flying Louts fails at creating fully fleshed-out characters regardless of how he uses his cast. By the end of Ash, we know as much about Riya and her fellow crew members as we did when she discovers most of them dead in the space station. It’s not a fatal flaw that Flying Lotus treats Riya as much as an enigma as the root cause of her dire circumstances. But Flying Lotus could learn a lesson from the films he cribs from--Alien and The Thing—that the more you develop your characters, and the greater the group dynamic on display, the more the audience invests in their fate. Posted: March 21, 2025. Web site: https://www.xyzfilms.com/ash |
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