Flying Lotus’s Atmospheric Sci-Fi Horror Thriller

Compared to Kuso, Flying Lotus’s scatological debut feature, Ash is a much more conventional effort for the beatmaker turned filmmaker. Upon waking up on an isolated interstellar outpost, Riya (Eiza González) finds herself in near darkness, and with no memory of what happened to her. As she yanks a makeshift weapon free from the chest of one of her dead comrades, the film evokes countless video games that have themselves pledged allegiance to the likes of Alien, The Thing, and Event Horizon.

Even as Ash morphs into something of a two-hander with the arrival of Brion (Aaron Paul), between the giallo-esque lighting and John Carpenter synths, Ash continues to wear its influences on its sleeve. Jonni Remmler’s script can hardly even be bothered to seed distrust between Riya and Brion, and it provides only the bare minimum of insight into what life at the outpost used to be like—when the lighting was a lot less moody and everyone’s blood was still inside of their bodies. And yet, Flying Lotus and his collaborators give Ash enough visual flair to occasionally transcend such limitations as forgettable characters with fuzzy motivations.

Everyone’s spacesuits have a curious biomechanical quality to them, spindly and pockmarked with glowing orbs at their joints, and Ash makes abstract use of insert shots and cutaways, heightening the overall sense of disorienting psychedelia. It also helps that the film is a solid delivery mechanism for genre thrills. When a rock squishes a man’s face, Ash cuts to his head perfectly centered in the frame before impact, suggesting a gruesome instant replay. It may not evince the transgressive abandon of Kuso, but between such flourishes and its liberal use of POV shots, the film sustains a hypnotic atmosphere on the way to its goopy, gory climax.