Ash – REVIEW

Eiza González in Ash


It’s not too often that I get to see indie horror in the theater, but I’ve tried my best to. By “indie,” I don’t mean a studio like A24 or NEON, even though they technically are indie. I mean Shudder, a studio that deals exclusively in horror and typically puts out their movies and movies they buy the right to into theaters with IFC. The last couple of Shudder films I’ve seen in theaters are In a Violent Nature, which was one of my favorite horror movies of last year, and Skinamarink, a lo-fi experimental horror movie that might just be the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had in a movie theater. That being said, I do have somewhat high expectations whenever I see the Shudder banner. Even if it’s not a great movie, I just wanna see some cool stuff, and boy did I get that with Ash, a cosmic horror/sci-fi exhibition match that pretty much snuck up on me. What Ash is ends up being a fun twist on something we’ve all seen before: Alien as a murder mystery. Riya, an astronaut stationed on a distant planet called Ash, wakes up to find her entire crew not just murdered, but torn to bits. She doesn’t remember anything about how it happened, outside of nightmarish flashes of her crew members attacking each other, seemingly going insane. Someone shows up to the station to rescue since one of the crew sent out a distress signal, and it all goes from there? Can Riya trust this man? Why does she not remember anything? What brutally murdered her friends? It’s honestly a whole lot of fun, even if it’s not exactly treading new ground. What makes this stand out from the sea of horror/sci-fi movies like it is Ash’s director, Flying Lotus. If you don’t know who he is, he’s mainly a very eclectic musician and has his own label, Brainfeeder. Ash is his second feature, and his first is Kuso from 2017, which Shudder also released in theaters. The look of the movie is also soaked in neon, with a lot of blood-red hallways. It’s very impressive stuff, especially on a budget of less than $1 million. Eiza González does a good job as Riya too, selling being the final girl throughout the whole movie. Aaron Paul has the most to do out of the rest of the cast, being the lone survivor of the crew that was left behind so that, in situations like this, there would be someone to rescue the crew. The other crew members aren’t fleshed out at all, but it was cool to see martial arts madman Iko Uwais pop in as the crew’s captain (this is my excuse to tell you to watch The Raid: Redemption and its sequel). The score, also done by Flying Lotus, is jaw-dropping too. It’s very reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s music for The Thing, and while it and Ash as a whole is basically an homage to The Thing, that’s not a bad thing at all. Ash isn’t reinventing the wheel, but if you like weird-ass cosmic horror, we don’t get a lot of those too often.


Ryan’s Grade: B+