Shudder holds two films by Steven Ellison, who works as a musician under the name Flying Lotus. His debut, Kuso, is less a narrative and more an anthology of creepy and gross vignettes after an earthquake in LA. Despite what it sounds like, Kuso seems like a house party of Ellison’s friends to make unruly shit. I don’t think it was meant to isolate viewers as much as welcome them to the fun. At least, that’s my takeaway.
Ash, however, feels more like Ellison’s first strategic approach to making a movie. While it may find itself swallowed up by many spaceship chamber pieces out there, the film creates the foundation for Ellison’s serious voyage into directing (and luckily, his talent comes with a good set of ears to create atmosphere dread in sky storms and illusions). Ellison’s party is now narrowed to a crew of astronauts tasked with landing on Planet KOI-442 to see if it’s inhabitable. More specifically, it’s through the perspective of Riya (Eiza Gonzalez), equipped with a video-game-protagonist bob cut, who wakes up to find the rest of her team brutally murdered. As she explores the blood splatters and facial gorges, Riya is interjected with hallucinations that seem to suggest that she may have had a participatory finger or two. She then meets Brion (Aaron Paul), a fellow astronaut who was tasked to rescue any survivors.
Similar to Kuso, Ash is also fueled by grotesque images that splice Riya’s reality. They sometimes feel flat and lost in the lack of depth, especially from the lighting production’s utilization of blues, reds, and greens. It’s a bummer that the ship’s interior is curtained so deeply in shadows that we don’t get to understand the lay of the land, despite being inside it for most of the film. Even if we did see the ship, the sequential order of the scenes can be so disorienting that, by the end, we might just remember that the ship has a working shower. The sound mixing is not my favorite, but I suppose that Ellison may have a proclivity for techno-scream disruption and a penchant for bleeding eardrums.
But to make a space jam film with a small budget is bold, and shouldn’t be dismissed as a small achievement. Ash reminds me of the boundary-pushing works from the princes of independent sci-fi Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead; the planet’s eerie presence is similar to the cult’s omnipotence in The Endless. There’s no doubt that Ellison conjures a duet between John Carpenter’s synthesizer-omens and David Cronenberg’s flesh-melting vision, but Riya’s investigative perspective also recalls Silent Hill, in which Ellison has long cited composer Akira Yamaoka as an inspiration.
Rather than an Alien-style takedown of nasty kill counts, Ash focuses on Riya’s psychological breakdown and the kind of villainous gaslighting you might not expect from extraterrestrial opponents (it is probably not a coincidence that Brion is similarly spelled like “prion”). It would be more impactful if we knew more about the crew, but unfortunately, we have to figure things out through Riya, who isn’t really interesting outside of this dilemma (no fault of Gonzalez’s, but the character only seems emote existential worry or “Fuck!”).
Still, Shudder and RLJE are doing God’s work by distributing this in theaters. It’s a testament that, in the cruel fate of Mickey 17’s tarnished production and Snow White’s…whatever, that Ash can be a film that people can see on the big screen. Let everyone know Flying Lotus. Let him do Alien. Let him do Pocahontas. Just let him have money to do more weird shit.
Ash
2025
dir. Flying Lotus
95 min.
Now playing @ AMC Boston Common and AMC Causeway
