Ash opens in theaters on Friday, March 21, and can stream on Shudder at a later date. This overview is predicated on a screening on the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival.
It’s been greater than 10 years since EA first floated the concept of a live-action Dead Space film, and we’re nonetheless ready for our first take a look at a Necromorph on the massive display. At first look, Ash looks like the subsequent smartest thing: The sci-fi horror film from music producer, DJ, rapper, and director Flying Lotus evokes Dead Space in tone, subject material and visuals. But followers of the franchise, and scary films set among the many stars typically, shouldn’t get their hopes up. Gnarly visuals, respectable bounce scares, and immaculate vibes aren’t sufficient to avoid wasting Ash from being convoluted, overstuffed, spinoff, and uninteresting.
Riya Ortis (Eiza González) wakes up in a desolated station that crashed on a distant planet; her environment are bathed in purple lights, warning messages flash on laptop screens, and lifeless our bodies are strewn concerning the place. This form of factor has been the muse for loads of progressive sci-fi tales – it’s the Weyland-Yutani-issued bread and butter of Alien and its many offshoots – however as the subsequent 95 minutes show, Ash isn’t certainly one of them one. The plot revolves round Riya’s makes an attempt to piece collectively the puzzle of what precisely occurred to the house station, her crewmates, and her recollections – she has no concept of who she is or how she obtained right here. Things get difficult with the arrival of Brion (Aaron Paul), a person claiming to be a crewmate who was orbiting across the planet when he obtained a misery name from the station and determined to analyze.
From there, Ash fails to current any concept that is not spinoff of one other film or a online game: Dead Space is a transparent affect, however so are Event Horizon’s trippy edge-of-a-black-hole freakouts. The bulk of it performs out like a recreation wherein Riya wakes up, rummages for clues, goes to sleep, and wakes again up with a horrendous imaginative and prescient of issues that occurred to the remainder of the crew – which can contradict the concept that she had nothing to do with their deaths. The investigation feels padded to the purpose of repetition, the product of a cryptic script whose plotting grows unnecessarily intricate. By primarily replaying all of Ash at a sooner, extra understandable clip, the ending proves that this story may’ve been informed in as little as 20 minutes.
What little we study concerning the characters of Ash is realized by means of flashbacks, as we progressively expertise the journey of the crew alongside Riya as she regains her reminiscence. And but none of them really feel important and even that attention-grabbing – they’re simply cannon fodder for the numerous alien threats they face. The Raid star Iko Uwais is especially wasted, getting nearly nothing to work with (and a few lackluster combat choreography) within the function of Riya’s boss on the station, Adhi. González, in the meantime, isn’t fairly as much as the duty of taking part in the sort of stranded survivor: She can provide the vulnerability and horror of Ripley in Alien, however not the steelier, action-hero Ripley of Aliens.
At least Flying Lotus manages to indicate off his knack for sound and visuals. The soundtrack is incredible, creating an eerie environment that is as enthralling as it’s terrifying. Ash seems each costly and expansive, with manufacturing design that creates a lived-in world; Flying Lotus makes use of the digital camera to make the corridors of the house station really feel each countless and claustrophobic.
Though what precisely the crew discovered on this unusual planet ought to stay unspoiled, remember that Ash takes loads of cues from The Thing in addition to Alien: Something is looking Riya and her comrades down, and their deaths are ghastly and slimy. (Flying Lotus appears to particularly take pleasure in crafting weird, gory dream sequences and horrifying scenes of mutilated our bodies coated in thick blood.) But despite the fact that what we see in Ash is attention-grabbing, it’s slowed down by a mediocre story, and it’s not helped by strobing gentle results and aggressive enhancing that’s so quick and intense, it’d simply induce movement illness.
