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DIRECTED BY: Flying Lotus

FEATURING: Eiza González, Aaron Paul

PLOT: An astronaut finds herself stranded on an outpost on an alien planet with the rest of the crew missing or dead, and no memory of what happened.

COMMENTS: Eight years ago, when we first heard that trippy electrojazz musician Flying Lotus (AKA Steven Ellison) would be trying his hand out at filmmaking, we were excited for multiple reasons. His experimental Afrofuturist aesthetic made it unlikely he would go down a conventional cinematic path; we expected his movies to be as weird as his beats (and his cosmic album covers). There was the hope he would extend the psychedelic lineage of his great aunt Alice Coltrane. And another African-American presence on the weird movie scene would be welcome; it’s a bit embarrassing that weird is so white. So when the first trailer for his debut feature Kuso dropped—with its colorful fuzzy aliens with TV monitor faces, George Clinton as a hip physician, and what looked like an uncooked Thanksgiving turkey flying through the Los Angeles sky—anticipation ramped up into the stratosphere.

But Kuso, which turned out to be more Adult Swim with an NC-17 rating than Sun Ra with a Lynchian spin, arrived as a major letdown. Juvenile, scatological, and borderline undistributable, it quickly and quietly sank out of most weirdophiles’ subconsciousnesses, despite a few collages and images that worked as standalone surrealist stills. An installment in the fifth installment of the long-spent V/H/S horror anthology franchise kept Lotus’ name alive as a filmmaker, but suggested little redemption. Still, when it was announced in 2022 that Neil Blomkamp was backing Lotus in making a relatively large budgeted sci-fi feature (originally to star Tessa Thompson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt), hope sprung up again that he would realize his promise.

The fact that I’ve opened this review by spending so much time on Lotus’ career, rather than his new movie, may clue you in to the main conclusion about Ash: it’s OK. It’s neither good enough nor bad enough to earn much in the way of analysis, or even to be the lede in its own review. Let’s stress this: Ash isn’t bad, and it has its own pleasures, entirely sensory rather than intellectual. The acting by the two leads is good. The ambiance is great: the spacecraft interiors have that fluorescent Alien light, but mostly served up through red (sometimes blue and green) filters. The expressionism in the lighting is influenced by Suspiria, and even more so Panos Cosmatos, whom Lotus consulted for advice. The extraterrestrial planet’s design comes from the “Yes”-album-cover-come-to-life school of sci-fi mise en scène, complete with floating rocks in the sky and a swirling pink mandala. The film’s best sci-fi doodad is the Japanese-speaking medical bot that performs surgeries or autopsies with equal, and sometimes inappropriate, cheerfulness. The music, surprisingly, is generic science fiction ambiance, functional but tending to fade into the background. (It would be interesting to hear Lotus’ original score, which he wrote first and then discarded when he decided it didn’t fit with the movie’s tone.)

The script is, at best, a medium for the visuals. Astronaut alone in a planetary outpost with amnesia, rest of crew appear to be victims of foul play, another astronaut arrives to investigate… it pretty much writes itself. The opening is strong enough, but soon it bogs down, with a second act that fails to generate meaningful paranoia between Eiza’s character and Paul’s (or between Eiza’s character and herself), stumbling into a third act that’s overstuffed with violence and a complete explanation of the story’s rather mild mysteries. You’re unlikely to be surprised by the story’s resolution, but like most other things about the movie it’s… satisfactory.

In a post-Ash “Variety” interview, Flying Lotus says “I would love to do another film soon if the right thing happens, but I’m definitely not in a hurry to get back into it.” He remains a musician first; he doesn’t have a burning passion to make films. This feels like a film that was made by someone with skill, but without a burning passion.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film’s seductive and trippy aesthetics help mask the overall dullness of this two-person chamber drama.”–Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)