Something about “Ash,” the new project from musician and sometimes-director Flying Lotus, feels like a short film. That’s not to say it flies by like one, it certainly doesn’t, but at its core exists a fantastic 45-minute subject that would’ve been a genuinely novel viewing experience had it been exported directly to Netflix.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get that film. What we have instead is an uninteresting and bloated, if visually stunning, mess.
“Ash” follows Riya (Eiza González), an astronaut on a mission to find another inhabitable planet. She wakes up one day to find that every single one of her crewmates has been killed. She’s suffering from a minor bout of amnesia and can’t remember what happened: has a parasite infected the ship? Has one among them gone mad? Before she has time to really think, she runs into Brion (Aaron Paul), another survivor who has just returned from scouting the area. For the next 95 minutes, these two set out to piece together the events leading up to catastrophe.
It’s an intriguing concept, quite distinct from the science-fiction horrors that it owes a clear debt to. This isn’t simply a rip-off of “Alien” or “The Thing,” for example. Flying Lotus — that is, Steven Ellison — has genuine artistic talent, and it’s for this reason that I didn’t want to be harsh in my criticism. There’s an earnestness here on Ellison’s behalf, he does seem to actually care about the product he’s presenting. I just wish I had gotten more out of it.
As I mentioned, the film is a marvelous visual feat. It’s clearly inspired, in equal parts, by the aesthetics of anime, video games, comic books and, of course, science fiction films of years past — especially “2001: A Space Odyssey” and its kaleidoscopic final sequence. The music too is great, which was to be expected from the artist who brought us “Cosmogramma.” I have no complaints with the acting, both González and Paul have already solidified themselves as great performers.
Nevertheless, despite my praise for this movie purely on its technical merits, I simply realized when I left the theater auditorium that I knew just as much about these characters and this plot that I knew going in. That’s not to say there’s no twists or turns, there definitely are, but those mean little when the characters’ motivations and desires are totally unclear.
It also means little when the entire rationale behind the plot of the film is fuzzy: why, exactly, is Earth uninhabitable? Why should I believe that we need to find a new planet? It’s heavily implied that humans were the cause for this, but how? If the writing were stronger, it could maybe get away with shrouding these things in mystery; but the writing simply isn’t strong enough, and it doesn’t really seem to actually intend for these things to remain so ambiguous. Ultimately, the film has no position and no explanation and suffers for it.
For this reason, “Ash” is a difficult project to write about. Trying to make any sense of it, trying to place it within a larger context, feels futile precisely because the film doesn’t really say anything. It attempts to be transgressive, there’s a lot of clear inspiration from the body horror of filmmakers like David Cronenberg, but what makes the transgression here so ineffective is that it serves no broader purpose. It’s just there, and without any substance backing it up it’s nothing more than a collection of cool images.
As I said before, in a perfect world, “Ash” would’ve been a short film or even a music video. It could’ve even been one of several short projects in a thematic anthology film, like Ellison’s 2017 film “Kuso” or his segment in “V/H/S/99.” Maybe, if he had the creative liberty to explore multiple intersecting or related stories, he could’ve more fully explored the themes he only vaguely and quietly hinted at here. Nevertheless, and unfortunately, at the end of the day, we’ve only been given something that’s bound to leave my mind entirely by the time this column is published.
