Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
Ash (2025 film)
Film by Flying Lotus From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
Ash is a 2025 American science fiction horror film directed by Flying Lotus and written by Jonni Remmler. It stars Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais, Kate Elliott, Beulah Koale, and Lotus. Its plot deals with an astronaut who awakens aboard a station on a strange planet with all her crew killed. Subject to amnesia and paranoia, she can't determine whether or not to trust a man who claims he knows her and was sent to rescue her.[4]
Remove ads
Ash had its world premiere at the SXSW on March 11, 2025, and was released on March 21, 2025. The film has grossed $956,233 and received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise aimed towards the performances, atmosphere, and visuals, as well as Lotus’ direction and score.
Remove ads
Plot
Summarize
Perspective
An astronaut, Riya, abruptly wakes up aboard a scientific research station on a distant, barren planet, with no recollection of where she is, how she got there or what happened to her, apart from some nightmarish memory fragments. As she explores the station, she finds several corpses and then hears someone entering through the station's airlock. Ambushing the arrival, Riya discovers that it is a man naming himself Brion, who claims to know her and to have come here after receiving a distress call from her.
In the course of Riya and Brion's investigation, supplemented by occasional flashbacks, it is revealed that Riya, Brion and the deceased crew - Adhi (the crew's command officer), Kevin (Riya's boyfriend), Clarke and Davis - were part of several exploratory expeditions from Earth to discover new habitable planets. With the other six expeditions lost, the latest discovery - the planet they're on, designated K.O.I.-442 and nicknamed "Ash" by Kevin - is Earth's last hope for success. While the others inhabited the planetside station, Brion stayed on a second station in orbit to maintain contact with Earth and monitor the crew's progress.
After unsuccessfully trying to find a trace of Clarke (the only crew member not found among the dead), Riya and Brion make preparations to leave the planet within twelve hours and reach the orbital facility, as the ground station's systems are compromised and life support is failing. Riya begins to experience more frequent flashbacks of her crew dying horrifically, including by her own hands. During a meteor storm, the station's systems register a hull breach. While working to seal the breach, Riya finds signs of someone having been inside the maintenance shafts, and based on her flashbacks, she suspects that Clarke is still alive and was infected by something unknown which caused her to become psychotic, thus making her responsible for the crew's death and now the station's sabotage.
With the station's oxygen supply even more depleted, Riya and Brion must leave on the very first line-up with the orbital station or else suffocate. In a drone's memory bank, Riya finds recordings of an EVA investigation after Brion discovered strange emissions from multiple points on the planet, yielding the discovery of atmospheric converters of alien origin. When Davis descended into a converter's shaft, he was killed when the devices suddenly activated and a rock fragment was propelled right into his face at high speed. She berates Brion for not telling her before, and she also remembers that she killed Kevin and Adhi, although she cannot remember the reason. Brion refuses to stay, insisting that the revelation of advanced alien life and functional terraforming comes before finding out what happened.
With two and a half hours left before Brion's lander intitiates automatic takeoff, he and Riya prepare for evacuation when Riya has a sudden flashback of Adhi aggressively attacking her, forcing her to kill him in self-defense. After recovering, she finds an intruder in an EVA suit - Clarke - aboard the station, and flees into the maintenance tunnels, where she finds Brion dead. With Clarke attacking her, Riya retreats to the station's bathroom, where she plugs a shower hose into Clarke's helmet and turns the water on, drowning her. But upon scanning Clarke's body, Riya finds no trace of infection in her, and with the orbital line-up imminent, she is forced to leave for the lander, only to find it sabotaged. Returning to the station, she scans Brion's body and is startled to discover that he had died long before she encountered him.
Upon this discovery, Riya realizes to her shock that she is the one infected and that Brion's presence on the station was just a hallucination caused by a nanotechnological parasite residing in her. An alien invertebrate had been inadvertently brought to the ground station by Kevin and infested its mainframe and airlock, disrupting contact with orbital and forcing Brion to come down. Ahdi and the others had argued for immediate evacuation, but Riya insisted on staying to investigate and recover the terraforming technology. While researching the alien, she found it infected by the parasite, which broke out and infected Ahdi, making him attack the rest of the crew. When Kevin killed Adhi, the parasite abandoned him and infected Kevin, who chased the fleeing Brion into the maintenance shafts and killed him there. After sending Clarke to the safety of the lander, Riya stayed behind to confront the alien and killed Kevin, whereupon the parasite infected her. Seeking to kill herself before it could fully take hold of her, Riya ingested potassium cyanide from the station's sick bay, but survived when the parasite neutralized the toxin. When Clarke returned later, Riya killed her by mistake because they both believed each other possessed.
The parasite informs Riya that its race has claimed this planet before the humans found it, and that, since it found the human race an inefficient life form, it has chosen to merge with and evolve her. Refusing to submit, she has the parasite extracted by the station's medbot, but it infests and revives Brion's corpse and attacks her. Riya kills it with a welding torch, and after exiting the burning station, she restores the lander to full operation and takes off towards the orbital facility, which, however, is already infested by more parasites.
Remove ads
Cast
- Eiza González as Riya Ortiz
- Aaron Paul as Brion Cargyle
- Iko Uwais as Adhi
- Beulah Koale as Kevin
- Kate Elliott as Catherine Clarke
- Flying Lotus as Shawn Davis
Production
In August 2022, it was announced that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tessa Thompson were cast in the film.[5] In March 2023, it was announced that Aaron Paul and Eiza González were cast to replace Gordon-Levitt and Thompson respectively.[4] In May 2023, it was announced that Uwais, Koale, Elliott and Flying Lotus were cast in the film and that production had begun.[6]
Flying Lotus learned how to make computer-generated imagery effects from YouTube videos.[7] Filming was done inside a former door manufacturing plant in New Zealand[8] using an Arri Alexa 35 camera. The film was edited using Media Composer.[9] Miniatures for the film were created by Adam Makarenko.[8]
The ending fight scene was inspired by Resident Evil.[8] Terrence Malick, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and John Carpenter were given special thanks in the credits. Flying Lotus stated that the soundtrack was inspired by the work of Carpenter.[10]
Release
Ash was released in the United States on March 21, 2025.[11] In February 2024, Amazon Prime Video acquired international distribution rights to the film at the European Film Market for around $10 million.[12]
Reception
Summarize
Perspective
Box office
In the United States, Ash was released alongside The Alto Knights and Snow White, and was projected to gross around $2 million from 1,136 theaters in its opening weekend.[13] It did not meet those projections, instead grossing $689,144 in its first three days.[14]
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 72% of 86 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6/10. The website's consensus reads: "Flying Lotus' Ash delivers the phantasmagorical goods with vivid visuals and a throbbing soundscape, elevating a predictable sci-fi story into a memorably stylish head-trip."[15] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 63 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[16]
Katie Rife of IndieWire graded the film a B- and wrote, "Like Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor, Ash makes extensive use of cut-ins that violently tear through the frame, jarring the audience with nightmarish imagery that's disarming under normal circumstances and probably soul-searingly terrifying if one's third eye happens to be open at the time. Think rage monsters — coated in blood that's as thick as crude oil — who scream under red lights as the score spikes in the background. It's very much a horror movie, and a freaky one at times."[17]
Zachary Lee of RogerEbert.com gave the film three stars out of four, writing, "Ash may not reinvent the sci-fi horror genre, but Flying Lotus knows when to subvert tropes and when to lean into them. When it's all executed with as controlled a precision as we see here, it's nothing less than thrilling. It's a B-movie operating at the highest levels of craftsmanship, intrigue, and performance."[18]
Remove ads
See also
- Friend of the World, a 2020 film with a similar premise
- Space horror
References
Works cited
External links
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads