Ash

I’ll confess to you something right off the bat. I’d never heard of this Flying Lotus cat. But this sci-fi thriller he’s left pounding at our door makes me mouth the words of Oliver Twist, “Please, sir, I want some more.” For what we chiefly have here is an immaculate blending of the best elements of Alien and The Thing, pulsing together. The result is Ash.

Eiza González is Riya, our Ripley for the next ninety-five minutes, the lone survivor, it first appears, of a team of space explorers in a distant world. Riya wakes having been rendered unconscious on a rapidly decaying station, with her entire crew slaughtered. She battles against injury and the collapsing elements as she slowly investigates the station for clues because Riya has a fragmented memory. On top of this, she has no personal memories of her life, plus no idea how the rest of the crew were killed. In addition, the alarm sounding reports the detection of the presence of an alien life form.

As all seems to remain muddled and hopeless, our heroine is shocked at a human visitor. He knows her, but she can’t remember him. Aaron Paul’s Brion is the crew member who circles the planet on which the station resides via an orbiter. There for rendezvousing with an escape vessel, should the outpost need to be evacuated.

“…lone survivor, it first appears, of a team of space explorers in a distant world…”

Now is as good a time as any, but Riya isn’t exactly hell-bent on leaving until she can put together the puzzle, which is why she has limited to no memory prior to waking up. This investigation takes the slow-boil opening of this picture and puts it back on the heat. At this point, the movie nails where Prometheus fails. Flying Lotus might be a flowering John Carpenter by way of Ridley Scott, getting solid support from a tight script by Jonni Remmler, cinematographer Richard Bluck bringing to the eye memories of Jordan Cronenweth, all blanketed beautifully, but Lotus’s score, that’s a little Carpenter and Vangelis, a delicious fusion.

The cast, in total, is good. Both Paul and Gonzalez have a lot of heavy lifting to do, and they waltz through it nicely, each hitting the right notes as far as the tone required of them for this piece. If anything, Gonzalez’s performance goes up a gear when the film does, making her one of the better Sigourney Weaver stand-ins in a while.

Ash is riveting, even as it drifts away from and back into the precarious tropes of the genre, like waves against the shore. Perhaps this assists in some predictability, but the quality of the filmmaker and the filmmaking make you want to stay the course and see how the mystery unfolds. Much like the experience of watching it, where Ash culminates is at once scintillating and satisfying a science fiction film this reviewer has seen in what seems like a long time. It’s truly enticing time at the movies, and I can’t wait to see where Flying Lotus takes us next.