ASH - Mark Reviews Movies

Ash, RLJE Films / Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 20, 2025

The opening sequence of Ash sets up an enticing string of mysteries and revelations. First, there's the question of our protagonist, who awakens with no memory of where or even who she is. Amidst dim or flickering lights in some kind of high-tech facility, she uncovers the second puzzle, after discovering a dead body with a knife in the chest. Someone, whoever this man was, has been killed—maybe even murdered.

It's not as if our main character knows the person's identity or what happened to him, because she doesn't even realize the bigger picture of this story until she steps outside the front door of this building. It's better to call it an airlock, perhaps, because Riya (Eiza González) is on a research base on a planet that's light-years away from Earth.

This is just the introduction of screenwriter Jonni Remmier's tale of terror, and the sense of isolation and dread is strong from the start. It matters where this story goes, as well as its general predictability, obviously, but director Flying Lotus maintains that air of eerie uncertainty so well that it also doesn't really matter if the story comes up short in a few ways. The film gives us the mood it wants to convey, set against a compelling backdrop of some faraway world filled with a couple of wonders and plenty of horrors, and carries it through to the end.

The filmmakers know what they want to do with this material, and they accomplish that goal quite well. It would be misguided, perhaps, to criticize the film for being repetitive in its plotting and shallow in developing its characters, for example—just in the same way it might be erroneous to condemn a farce for similar "shortcomings." This isn't about the plot or the characters, after all. It's a film in which the setting (not to mention what has been in this place long before any humans arrived on the planet), the assorted mysteries, and that anxious atmosphere that nothing is right and little is as it seems here amount to its real purpose.

As such, the story is basically a walking tour of the facility and certain parts of the planet. Riya, played with instant sympathy and a feeling of unease that reflects the film's tone by González, has to investigate what has happened in this research station, of course, since she appears to be the sole survivor of some bloody massacre and doesn't remember a thing about how that violence occurred.

While she looks around and finds more bodies or signs of almost certainly fatal encounters, Riya begins to regain some memory. She and a team of five other astronauts (including characters played by Iko Uwais, Beulah Koale, and the director himself) traveled to this planet as part of a wider mission to find a world that could serve as a suitable substitute for Earth. Humanity wrecked that planet. Six other voyages failed, and this seventh one appears to have hit the jackpot. The atmosphere isn't entirely breathable, but it's a good start, at least.

Well, it would have been, that is, until most of the crew died or was killed by someone or something. Soon enough, Riya is joined by Brion (Aaron Paul), the astronaut in charge of communications, who has been on a ship orbiting the planet. He's not much help, of course, and, with the likelihood of a murderer on the loose, wants to head back to the ship as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Riya starts having more flashes of memory, and they don't bode well for her part in what happened.

There is a weirdly circular pattern to this simple plot, which basically raises one mystery, seems to answer it, and then returns to questioning it again. That has to do with the deaths of the crew, obviously, as Riya suspects Clarke (Kate Elliott), the only one whose body she can't find, but, soon enough, has very good reason to wonder if that's just a red herring.

This process could be frustrating, except that Remmier's screenplay does find ways to evolve those questions, based on new information about the planet. It's probably not saying too much to suggest that an alien world might have, well, some kind of alien being, entity, or creature on it, but the details of whatever that may be and how it comes to figure into this story are revealed with the same sort of deliberateness as the central murder mystery.

The plot may not surprise in the big picture, especially since the finale basically comes down to a familiar conflict that spreads across the narrative in the present tense and within flashbacks. The way the script arrives there, though, does give a feeling of revelation of varieties both clever—the reason the planet has a particular atmosphere, for example—and increasingly gruesome—especially as those killings are recalled, the nature of whatever else is on the planet starts to emerge, and we meet a surgical robot with an amusing apathy for human life and physical pain.

To worry oneself with the logic of the story of Ash isn't exactly the most worthwhile way to appreciate the film, anyway. Flying Lotus emphasizes that idea throughout, with the jumbled editing of Riya's occasional recollections and hallucinations, the way the neon-like lighting within the facility isn't exactly conducive to living but definitely sets a mood, and how the story does basically become an excuse for a series of grisly computer and practical effects (Riya's foe is particularly gnarly in its final face-expanding-and-splitting form). It's nothing unique or special, but the boldness of the style on display makes the film a successful horror exercise, to be sure.

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