‘Ash’ Review: Eiza Gonzalez and Aaron Paul Star in Flying Lotus’ Trippy but Inert Space Drama

In Ash, Flying Lotus’ moody and mellow sci-fi thriller, a woman wakes up to the low hum of a malfunctioning system. A chilly neon blue, inflected with the fire-engine red of an emergency light, bathes the room. Even through her blurry vision, the woman, whose name we later learn is Riya (Eiza Gonzalez), can see the extent of the surrounding damage. The destruction includes overturned tables, flipped chairs, broken test tubes and bloodied bodies. These are the corpses of her crew, and when Riya looks at them, her memory flickers. The blinkered visions reveal a mutiny on the space aircraft. But who turned on whom and why is she the only one left?  

Ash answers these questions with a special attention to atmosphere. The film’s seductive and trippy aesthetics help mask the overall dullness of this two-person chamber drama. Flying Lotus, who made his directorial debut eight years ago with Kuso, experiments with perspective, lighting and music (he also composed the score) to craft a sensorially tense story of amnesia and betrayal. Care is also taken to render technology of the future in a way that not only feels realistic but can also be quite funny.

Though Ash offers less on the narrative front — characters are underbaked, motivations are foggy and there are few thrills to be found — it’s an impressive exercise in mood. At times, the film shares a boundary-pushing aesthetic ambition with more recent projects like Neptune Frost, Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s memorable Afro-futurist musical. 

As Riya roams the spacecraft trying to piece together what happened, Flying Lotus builds out her world. Working with production designer Ross McGarva, he mixes mid-century modern and dystopian visuals to craft the space ship’s handsome interior. Whereas most science-fiction stories lean into severe architecture, marked by metals and stone, there’s surprising warmth to this vessel.

That intimacy is reinforced by a flashback, in which Riya and her team sit around a dinner table for a toast to their mission. Outside the ship lies the unknown planet, an environmentally treacherous arena where the sky has the colors of Northern Lights and ash delicately floats to the ground. The amnesiac astronaut steps outside briefly before realizing that the oxygen levels are unsuited to her human body. 

Soon after she wakes up, Riya encounters Brion (Aaron Paul), a fellow astronaut who the crew previously thought died. He helps patch her up, scanning her body and closing a gash in her eyebrow with a portable robotic surgical kit. This tool, with its chipper automated voice, brings a reliable and welcome comic relief to the film. Brion gently interrogates Riya about her memory; she tells him the little that she knows and somehow they figure out that Clarke (Kate Elliot), another member of Riya’s crew, might have survived. Her body is nowhere to be found and they wonder if she could have caused all the destruction.

The two astronauts establish a quest with two goals: find Clarke and complete their interplanetary mission, the importance of which is frequently invoked but not sufficiently clarified. As Riya and Brion work together, the atmosphere of their ship becomes increasingly thick with tension, but their story makes less and less sense. Working with cinematographer Richard Bluck, Flying Lotus uses intimate close-ups and POV shots to create an unsettling ambience and establish Riya’s growing sense of claustrophobia. Without her memories, the space she once called home becomes nothing more than a trap of unknowns. The stiffness of Gonzalez’s movements — each action is prefaced by a moment of slight hesitation — helps underscore her character’s confusion. 

Ash’s formal ambition begins to clash with its sometimes tedious plotting when Riya and Brion start becoming more suspicious of one another, wondering which of their stories can be trusted. Their first encounter is hardly warm, but it lacks the edge that would make their later interactions feel necessarily fraught. In this and other moments during the film, the stakes established by the mood don’t line up with the story propelling the action, almost as if connective threads were left on the cutting room floor. While Flying Lotus has constructed a film filled with distinctive imagery, Ash, on the whole, feels just as spotty as Riya’s memory.

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