Originality turns to Ash in gory, trippy collage of sci-fi influences
The second film from Flying Lotus draws from plenty of better genre works, but never works on its own merits.
Photo: Shudder
Flying Lotus, whatever his shortcomings as a director, certainly has taste. Even in the musician-filmmaker’s first feature, the Adult Swim-like anthology Kuso, he attracted an army of talent ranging from Silent Hill’s Akira Yamaoka to Salad Fingers’ David Firth. His second film, the slight sci-fi horror Ash, continues to court the late-night crowd, but with its influences, not its collaborators. Draping a Dead Space skin over a straightforward Alien riff with a heavy side of The Thing—a team on a nebulous space mission navigates cramped hallways, wears cable-coated spacesuits, performs self-surgery, and wields readily available flamethrowers—Ash is at least brazen in its ode to the genre media Flying Lotus so obviously appreciates. But making a midnight mindfuck does, sadly, require at least a little bit of mindfulness.
Beyond FlyLo’s respectable curation of vibes and contributions to the crunchy, bass-heavy electronic soundtrack, the goopy, gory, trippy fun to be had here turns to Ash, mostly due to Jonni Remmler’s tedious script. Though it starts with a bang, waking Riya (Eiza González) up alone in an outpost filled with the brutalized corpses of her former teammates, the film listlessly moves back and forth through time on its way to an inevitable explanation. The brief flashback interludes to when Riya’s crew—Adhi (Iko Uwais), Kevin (Beulah Koale), Clarke (Kate Elliott), and Davis (Flying Lotus, who saves a nasty death for himself)—was alive and kicking are barebones, nearly as quiet and sparse as the scenes in which they’re all lying bloody on the floor. Temporally caught between, the amnesiac Riya keeps experiencing jumpscare memories from the bloodbath that is finally unpacked in full during the final act.