Science fiction and horror make for awkward bedfellows. On one hand, the themes of science fiction – such as the confrontation of the unknown and the nature of humanity – are ripe for exploration within the genre. But believable science fiction does not come cheap; it requires a level of investment and production design that undercuts the appeal of a genre often looked to for low-budget innovation. So when a filmmaker dares to step up to the challenge, the least we can do is afford them a closer look. That’s certainly the case for Flying Lotus’s Ash, a new horror film steeped in video game aesthetics.
When Riya (Eiza González) opens her eyes, she is awakened to a world she can barely recognize. She is on some kind of space station, but something terrible has happened, and the other bodies she finds – her crewmembers, she assumes – have been subjected to acts of extreme violence. When she closes her eyes, she can see flickers of the past, but with no memories to draw on, she’s left to stumble through the station, poking at the fragments of her newly destroyed life.
Thankfully, she won’t be alone for long. Shortly after she awakes, the station receives a visitor: Brion (Aaron Paul), a fellow member of her expedition who begins to fill in some of the missing parts. Riya and her dead compatriots are the crew of an exploratory mission tasked with finding a new home for the survivors of Earth’s latest ecological disaster. Riya and others had set up the station while Brion stayed in the orbital platform above, but with most of the crew dead and an unknown pathogen potentially spread through the station, it might be time to abandon ship – that is, if the creature lurking in Riya’s memories will let them leave.
Ash is the debut narrative feature from Steven Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus to fans of his musical career. While he is not new to directing – he has the anthology film Kuso and a V/H/S/99 segment under his belt – it would be safe to say that Ash is our strongest look yet at what makes Flying Lotus tick as a filmmaker. And given that an entire generation might know his music best from video games and Adult Swim bumpers, it should come as no surprise that what makes Flying Lotus tick is a whole bunch of ‘90s horror.
In fact, there may be no modern movie more steeped in the aesthetics of video game design than Ash. From its first-person action sequences to creature design lifted from franchises like Dead Space, Ash feels like more of a multi-disciplinary approach to genre than we’re used to – where video games and film are equal fodder for a new lexicon of science fiction and horror. When the film finally gives voice to Riya’s alien adversary, the screen fills with a single blinking eye and a text scrawl at the bottom of the page. It’s the kind of boss monologue near and dear to the hearts of an entire generation of MS-DOS gamers, and Ash’s willingness to draw from the full history of video game horror is one of its most endearing qualities.
Not all of it works. The secret sauce for any science fiction film is futuristic cohesion, and there are times when Flying Lotus appears to be cobbling together more concepts than he can effectively stitch together. Part of this is a function of budget, of course. Ash is clearly a passion project, but the budget here is more Doom: Annihilation than Alien: Covenant, and the film can sometimes feel hemmed in by its lack of a more expansive lore. There are standout elements – the macabrely friendly surgery bot is one of the film’s best touches – but Ash could have been stronger for shining a brighter light on the civilization that Riya was fleeing.
There’s also tension between the cosmic storytelling and the more mundane genre elements. In one minute, Ash offers a kaleidoscope of imagery that hints at the non-Euclidean existence of other life forms. In the next minute, Iko Uwais is kicking people in the chest. This mashup of self-seriousness and goofiness can certainly work in space – Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon remains a masterpiece of ‘90s horror – but Flying Lotus seems a tad too earnest to give himself over the movie’s midnighter potential. The result is a movie that knows it’s not hard sci-fi but is afraid to veer too far into the waters of pulp. Not a fatal imbalance, but one that often makes the film feel like self-contained chunks rather than a coherent whole.
Still. It may feel like damning with faint praise to call Ash a sturdy film, but even with the bar for horror movies set in space set so low – so low, embarrassingly low – there are still so many movies that fail to clear it. Here Flying Lotus has combined his love of the genre with an ambitious cosmic streak, and the result is a movie that holds its own on the big screen against films twice its size. Ash will have its proponents, and unlike many would-be cult classics of modern Hollywood, there’s no real reason for the rest of us to disagree. The people clamor for space slashers; today, at least, Flying Lotus has satisfied our demand. [3/5]
