Movie Review: ASH

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 21st, 2025 / 06:18 AM

Rating: R
Stars: Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais, Kate Elliott, Beulah Koale, Flying Lotus
Writer: Jonni Remmler
Director: Flying Lotus
Distributor: IFC Films/RLJE Films/Shudder
Release Date: March 21, 2025

“Ash” is the colloquial name of Planet AOI-442. We’re on a scientific outpost established here, one of many set up throughout the galaxy in hopes of finding a new world suitable for humankind.

We learn this gradually, as we wake up with extremely confused Riya (Eiza González), who is on the floor of her quarters. Riya is having horrifying visions of mutilated people. She has a wound on her forehead, and there is blood on her bedsheet.

The ship’s computer keeps announcing that it is suffering a system failure and is rebooting. Riya stumbles through hallways, where she sees other crew members dead, mostly impaled with various tools.

Then we flash back to when everyone was alive and well in the mess hall, minus Brion (Aaron Paul), who is up in the orbital monitor.

By the time Brion returns, the massacre has already occurred. There is a ticking clock, as the facility is about to run out of oxygen.

Riya’s memories are so scrambled that she isn’t sure who she is, much less what occurred. However, she is driven to find the truth, which Brion says jibes with her pre-accident personality.

The screenplay by Jonni Remmler has plenty of solid, if not exactly groundbreaking, science-fiction concepts in the mix. With Riya’s fractured memories and hallucinations, there are always legitimate surprises and jump scares.

There are also bits of dark humor – watch for a consistently insensitive electronics system with animated causes of death.

Director Flying Lotus loves juxtaposing colors, putting the hot neon red of the ship’s interior with the door open onto the somber gray-blue planet-scape. He also knows how to stage person-to-person fights – with THE RAID: REDEMPTION’s Iko Uwais in the cast, there’s the promise of awesome action – and alien infestations.

But because the filmmakers have opted to go for maximum disorientation, we don’t have time to get to know and therefore care about anybody. Even Riya is something of a blank slate – we have to take Brion’s word for what she was like before.

Consequently, the emotional stakes never get very high. The storytelling style clues us in as to where all of this is going, and although ASH gratifyingly goes past this point, we remain more curious than invested. For the full picture, there is a mid-end credits sequence that confirms what we may have surmised.

González is passionately determined, Paul plays Brion as a convincingly worried professional, and the rest of the cast, which also includes Kate Elliott, Beulah Koale and director Lotus, is very capable.

ASH is always an eyeful, it is usually kinetic and it fulfills its science-fiction narrative requirements. It just isn’t emotionally engaging.

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