A trippy sci-fi mystery is explored in head-turning, stomach-churning outer space pic Ash – streaming on Prime Video. Steve Newall suits up for this cosmic horror by Flying Lotus.
Lots of people come to Aotearoa New Zealand to make movies now. For some, it’s the stunning scenery, while others appreciate how the cities can stand in for more expensive US locations. One filmmaker in particular has enjoyed the country’s ability to support a giant water tank and technology to render giant blue aliens—but new sci-fi thriller Ash may be one of the more unusual films shot in Aotearoa yet.
For starters, the director’s name is Flying Lotus, which may come as a surprise to newcomers unfamiliar with their acclaimed and esoteric musical output of the past two decades. There’s always been a strong visual aesthetic accompanying Flying Lotus music, and it offers a strong fit for those with brave artistic visions—as well as collaborations with creative partners on his music videos, he’s soundtracked other people’s films, produced a good chunk of Adult Swim’s bumper music and made original music for Grand Theft Auto’s FlyLo FM radio channel, which he also hosted as the in-game announcer.
More recently, Flying Lotus has been creating his own visual works, including his directorial debut (billed as “Steve” as opposed to Flying Lotus) with Kuso in 2017, an anthology film so weird that the Flicks synopsis describes it as being “about… erm… actually, we can’t describe this”. Speaking of anthologies, Flying Lotus also contributed a highlight of V/H/S/99 with horrific children’s game show segment Ozzy’s Dungeon.
So, it might not come as a surprise that Flying Lotus wasn’t shooting in Aotearoa for the usual reasons (with the exception of a sequence set in native bush it’s reported to have been filmed inside a former door manufacturing plant). Instead, Ash turns it back on the great outdoors with a vibe that is much more claustrophobic, set inside a spacecraft that’s landed to explore a distant planet. Which would sound pretty standard sci-fi stuff… if it weren’t for the grotesque, literally face-melting hallucinatory visions being experienced by Riya (Eiza González) as she tries to piece events together.
In particular, why the rest of her crew (which includes Indonesian action star Iko Uwais, Kiwis Beulah Koale and Kate Elliott and even FlyLo himself) have been slaughtered, what they’re doing there—and even who she is.
A knock to the head explains some of this perception problem, and so do the trippy cosmic visuals swirling outside the marooned spacecraft. It’s pretty clear that there’s not going to be a neat and tidy explanation for how shit hit the fan, and as Riya starts to access more of her recollections, they are both disturbingly violent and sometimes contradictory. Was she attacked or is she the aggressor? It’s a question Riya can’t answer, stuck by herself in a space slaughterhouse—at least for the film’s first act.
Like the viewer, Riya doesn’t entirely seem to trust her faculties when she suits up, goes exploring outside and sees a distant figure waving back at her. And after the earlier flashbacks, the reappearance of crewmate Brion (Aaron Paul) back at the ship raises some initial scepticism.
But Brion begins filling in (some) of the gaps, and together the pair can move beyond trying to figure out what has happened, and much more crucially, figure out how to lift off before their dwindling oxygen runs out. Which is very much not to say that they won’t have any face-melting or head-crushing to encounter before they are done…
Flying Lotus has cited filmmakers Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Jean-Pierre Jeunet as inspirations, as well as Mandy director Panos Cosmatos—a friend of Flying Lotus. “we would hit him up all the time and pick his brain and complain about the process and be like, “Dude, is it always gonna be this way?” Flying Lotus told Variety.
Unsurprisingly, given those influences, Ash is an exercise in style and mood more than characters or dialogue. And, like those other filmmakers, it finds ways to establish tone and terror on a small (rumoured to be south of a million dollars) budget. The power of lighting is apparent, along with glimpses at horror that last the blink of an eye, embedding themselves in your mind and making the viewer question what they’ve just seen. There’s an eeriness that will be familiar to gamers, with the filmmaker saying he bonded with Eiza González over the original Silent Hill.
Elsewhere in the Variety article, he says: “I think being able to adapt is truly the director’s call. That’s when you know the real ones from the fakes.”
In the case of Flying Lotus, that wasn’t just what he encountered on set each day. Unsurprisingly, he wrote and produced the film’s score himself. But, when he sat down in the edit, he had to accept the music did not work and start over. The audible results of this new approach echo John Carpenter and Vangelis—artistically it’s further evidence that he’s a filmmaker prepared to make sacrifices en route to a memorable outer space freakout.
