Ash (SXSW) Review: A sci-fi horror flick in the vein of Event Horizon

PLOT: An astronaut (Eiza Gonzalez) wakes up on a distant planet and discovers her entire crew has been killed. Suffering from amnesia, she soon meets a fellow astronaut (Aaron Paul) who says he was part of her team, but she’s unsure whether she can trust him.

REVIEW: Space horror is a reliable sub-genre of the sci-fi universe. Alien is the king of the castle as far as it goes, but the vastness of space is always a good place to set a horror flick, and it’s a genre that I have a particular weakness for. Event Horizon is a favourite of mine, and I even like the not-great ones, like the campy Saturn 3 or The Black Hole. Ash owes a lot to the genre classics, with director Flying Lotus clearly having a deep bench of genre knowledge. However, his influences aren’t limited to film, with many noting Ash has several striking similarities to the video game Dead Space.

It gives Eiza Gonzalez her first major leading role after many years as a supporting player in big movies like Ambulance, The League of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and Baby Driver. She delivers a solid performance as Riya, who has found herself stranded on a new planet, Ash, not knowing how or why she’s there. Even worse is the fact that she has violent visions of dispatching her crewmates, and she begins to wonder if perhaps she was the one who killed them all.

Much of it is a two-hander, with Aaron Paul showing up as the mission’s commander, who was away on another part of the planet when the killings happened and is now trying to evacuate them. Having a suspicion that a parasite might have been responsible for what happened to her crew, Riya isn’t sure they should be leaving, but with their oxygen running out, they don’t have much choice.

Both Gonzalez and Paul are solid, even if Flying Lotus’s film, which Jonni Remmler wrote, is rather thin in substance. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before. However, despite a low budget, Flying Lotus has done a nice job of giving the movie a sense of scale, and the violence, when it hits, is hardcore.

For those not in the know, Flying Lotus, who also appears in the movie, is a rapper/DJ but has been toiling away in the genre for some time now, having helmed the well-received “Ozzy’s Dungeon” segment of V/H/S/99, as well as the horror flick, Kuso. The movie looks terrific, with neon-soaked visuals, excellent sound design, and an impeccable score by the director himself. 

But, what really makes the movie worth seeing for horror fans is how violent it is, with the gore notched up to eleven during the climax. With Iko Uwais in the cast as one of Riya’s doomed shipmates, there’s even a little bit of fighting, and Lotus has a keen sense for staging action, especially when you consider how limited his resources likely were.

While Ash probably won’t make a huge dent theatrically, I could see it pleasing a whole lot of fans once it makes its Shudder debut (they’re distributing it with RLJE Films). Imagine a somewhat lesser version of Event Horizon or a MUCH better version of Supernova, and that’s about what you get with Ash. 

Ash

AVERAGE

6

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