Ash Review

Ash opens in theaters on Friday, March 21, and will stream on Shudder at a later date. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival.

It’s been more than 10 years since EA first floated the idea of a live-action Dead Space movie, and we’re still waiting for our first look at a Necromorph on the big screen. At first glance, Ash seems like the next best thing: The sci-fi horror movie from music producer, DJ, rapper, and director Flying Lotus evokes Dead Space in tone, subject matter and visuals. But fans of the franchise, and scary movies set among the stars in general, shouldn’t get their hopes up. Gnarly visuals, decent jump scares, and immaculate vibes aren’t enough to save Ash from being convoluted, overstuffed, derivative, and dull.

Riya Ortis (Eiza González) wakes up in a desolated station that crashed on a remote planet; her surroundings are bathed in red lights, warning messages flash on computer screens, and dead bodies are strewn about the place. This sort of thing has been the foundation for plenty of innovative sci-fi stories – it’s the Weyland-Yutani-issued bread and butter of Alien and its many offshoots – but as the next 95 minutes prove, Ash isn’t one of them one. The plot revolves around Riya’s attempts to piece together the puzzle of what exactly happened to the space station, her crewmates, and her memories – she has no idea of who she is or how she got here. Things get complicated with the arrival of Brion (Aaron Paul), a man claiming to be a crewmate who was orbiting around the planet when he got a distress call from the station and decided to investigate.

From there, Ash fails to present any idea that isn’t derivative of another movie or a video game: Dead Space is a clear influence, but so are Event Horizon’s trippy edge-of-a-black-hole freakouts. The bulk of it plays out like a game in which Riya wakes up, rummages for clues, goes to sleep, and wakes back up with a horrendous vision of things that happened to the rest of the crew – which may contradict the idea that she had nothing to do with their deaths. The investigation feels padded to the point of repetition, the product of a cryptic script whose plotting grows unnecessarily intricate. By essentially replaying all of Ash at a faster, more comprehensible clip, the ending proves that this story could’ve been told in as little as 20 minutes.

What little we learn about the characters of Ash is learned through flashbacks, as we gradually experience the journey of the crew alongside Riya as she regains her memory. And yet none of them feel essential or even that interesting – they’re just cannon fodder for the many alien threats they face. The Raid star Iko Uwais is particularly wasted, getting almost nothing to work with (and some lackluster fight choreography) in the role of Riya’s boss on the station, Adhi. González, meanwhile, isn’t quite up to the task of playing this type of stranded survivor: She can give the vulnerability and horror of Ripley in Alien, but not the steelier, action-hero Ripley of Aliens.

At least Flying Lotus manages to show off his knack for sound and visuals. The soundtrack is fantastic, creating an eerie atmosphere that’s as enthralling as it is terrifying. Ash looks both expensive and expansive, with production design that creates a lived-in world; Flying Lotus uses the camera to make the corridors of the space station feel both endless and claustrophobic.

Though what exactly the crew found on this strange planet should remain unspoiled, be aware that Ash takes plenty of cues from The Thing as well as Alien: Something is hunting Riya and her comrades down, and their deaths are ghastly and slimy. (Flying Lotus seems to especially enjoy crafting bizarre, gory dream sequences and horrifying scenes of mutilated bodies covered in thick blood.) But even though what we see in Ash is interesting, it’s bogged down by a mediocre story, and it’s not helped by strobing light effects and aggressive editing that’s so fast and intense, it might just induce motion sickness.