Flying Lotus may be best known as a musician, winning a Grammy for producing Kendrick Lamar’s masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly, but in the cinephile community, he is known as one of horror cinema’s most exciting sickos. His sophomore feature, Ash, offers every ounce of aesthetic style that fans will expect, but it is squandered on an uninteresting and derivative script.
Ash Review
Ash follows a woman who wakes up as the sole survivor of a vicious attack on her interplanetary mission as she sets out on a mission to discover what happened to the rest of her crew. It’s an unholy conglomeration of every sci-fi horror trope you can think of, from Alien to The Thing, resulting in a film that is very difficult to get invested in.
Because Ash is so generic, it ends up dragging despite a runtime that is just over 90 minutes. It also doesn’t help that Jonni Remmler’s script is very convoluted and basically incoherent. The twist that is confirmed in the final 10 minutes is something that audiences will be able to figure out from the very beginning. As a result, it feels like Ash is spinning its wheels for most of its first and second acts.
Beyond that, the script struggles to establish its themes outside of one monologue in the final act talking about how the protagonist’s colonialist behavior is the true evil. The use of space exploration as an allegory for imperialism is nothing new, and unfortunately, Remmler adds very little new to the conversation, settling on painfully broad statements that don’t add anything new.
These shortcomings are exacerbated by the fact that the character development is so scant. We pick up with the protagonist isolated, and we only learn about most of her team through flashbacks. Unfortunately, this gives us very little reason to care about anyone’s survival — protagonist included — since everyone is so frustratingly archetypal.
Ash is the first leading role for Eiza González (Baby Driver, Alita: Battle Angel), and while she has certainly shown her talent in the past, Ash calls to question her ability to carry a film by herself. It’s hard to tell how much of this is her and how much of it is the script, but the performance is entirely devoid of any charisma.
Aaron Paul fares slightly better in his prominent supporting role, although he doesn’t stack up with some of the most obvious comparisons (George Clooney in Gravity comes to mind as another male co-star in a female-driven space chiller). The flaws of this performance, though, can easily be boiled down to the utterly ridiculous dialogue that he is given to work with.
The rest of the ensemble isn’t in the movie enough to make much of an impact, which is a shame because they show potential. Beulah Koale (Next Goal Wins) plays a forgettable love interest, while Iko Uwais (The Raid: Redemption), Kate Elliott, and FlyLo himself round out the rest of her crew.
As one would expect from a filmmaker like Flying Lotus, whose first movie Kuso was an experimental head trip, Ash is an exercise in style over substance. It has a gorgeous use of production design, some surreal imagery that includes some brilliant use of gore, and even a few fight sequences that are impressively choreographed (probably thanks to the role of actor and martial artist Uwais). It carries FlyLo’s voice through and through.
Unfortunately, it’s clear that Ash is also limited by its low budget. When it uses practical effects for its gory moments, it’s pretty solid. However, the film’s CGI leaves something to be desired on a massive level. It looks cheap in a way that undermines its potential success as a style-over-substance horror movie.
It also doesn’t help that the world building in Flying Lotus’s vision of the cosmos is less than original. The spaceship set and costumes are pretty generic, feeling like a knock-off of the franchises that defined our vision of outer space horror. The desert planet (and the monsters that inhabit it) aren’t particularly unique, either.
Without a doubt, the best part of Ash is the score, which was composed by Flying Lotus himself. While the script constantly struggles to keep the viewer’s interest, the music propels the film forward, ramping up the tension and ensuring that audiences stay on the edge of their seats even when nothing that exciting or horrifying is happening.
Is Ash worth watching?
However, you would be hard-pressed to find anything particularly horrifying about Ash, a film that suffers from such an underdeveloped, generic script that even the vision of an idiosyncratic filmmaker like Flying Lotus can’t save it. The fact that this is virtually indistinguishable from any other Alien or The Thing B-movie rip-off makes this one of the biggest disappointments of the year so far.
Ash premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival, which runs March 7-15 in Austin, TX.
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