I went into this movie kind of cold: basically knew that it was a space horror film with Aaron Paul. I’m still kind of on the fence about how groundbreaking this movie is, but visually it’s really fun to see in theaters and the casting is great. The script is a black box mystery and it runs at around 90 minutes, which makes it feel like an easy rec for just about anyone who thinks they hate space movies (me).
I think this movie kind of fits into a shared aesthetic with Black Mirror’s Beyond the Sea WHICH ALSO STARS AARON PAUL and an ascendant thirst Trap Josh Harnett–and maybe I can add contemporary psycho-space dramas like Mur Lafferty’s Station Eternity and the OG Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice.
But more important than that, and I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, is that I think a lot of the plot elements of Ash are tropes from sci-fi literotica: Riya (Eiza González of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Hobbs and Shaw, and Baby Driver!) wakes up in medias res without any knowledge of what has happened to her, who she even is, and the one helpful neighborhood expositioner there, Brion (Aaron Paul) very helpfully offers her drugs to help medicate her injury and fills in the gaps of her short term memory loss; Riya’s flashbacks of her past experiences with her crew all bear a faintly or explicitly erotic charge to them. Smelling her captain’s clothes kickstarts intimate moments of them together which snaps back to her wearing his clothes on his bed; later when Riya dodges a potentially damning question about her memory returning, Brion informs her of her romantic relationship with yet another member of the crew; and there are obvious feints toward Brion and Riya themselves having feelings for each other as he plays the hero to save her from doom and bring her back to the orbiting craft from which he’s come. All the while, brain parasites are infecting the crew and making them do creepy and violent things to each other.
Flying Lotus, the multi-hyphenate DJ-filmmaker-music producer, is responsible for a number of imaginative and weird horror films, which would’ve made me a lot more excited about seeing this movie on opening weekend than I was! He’s responsible for the found-film horror V/H/S/99 (2022) and a Blade Runner anime episode from (2017) among other things, including the music for this YouTube horror short from 2015 amazingly titled Fuckkkyouuu but this is by far his most high profile film.
Ultimately, I’m kind of split on where to place this movie. It’s not quite the creepypasta skin crawling experience of I Saw the TV Glow and not quite the laugh your ass off scary of Longlegs, but it’s doing some of its own things, building a visual lexicon that feels like a proper mix of send ups to classic space horror films, while also trying to tell a different story? And at half a million dollars for a budget, it’s kind of an amazing leap of faith to see on the big screen.
