“What do you remember?” Brion asks Riya.
Bits and pieces.
She remembers that she’s a researcher stationed on a distant planet, though she couldn’t tell you where.
She remembers that the bodies of people littering her research station were once her and Brion’s friends, though she only remembers their names. She also remembers Brion is her friend, or at least a coworker. He claims he was on the orbiting satellite when everything went down, and he landed to make sure everything was OK when he didn’t hear back.
Another sudden memory reveals a fight. A mutiny?
She remembers a pair of bloodstained scissors in her hand.
Brion mentions something about a parasite and a surviving crew member.
Riya latches onto that idea. Because that’s far more comforting than the growing suspicion that she had something to do with it all.
Characters engage in an ethical and moral debate risking their lives to help the rest of humanity. It’s unclear what exactly has happened back on Earth, but context clues indicate that the planet likely isn’t doing too well. Thus, if these characters abandon their mission for the sake of protecting themselves, it may just threaten the survival of humanity. But hey, at least they’re talking about it.
None.
We’re told that a man and woman were in a relationship. One crewmate whose room is right next to theirs comments on the suggestive sounds he hears there.
Riya takes a shower. Besides her upper backside, we don’t see anything.
As Riya struggles to put the pieces back together, we see flashes of extreme violence: Blood sprays as a man gets stabbed repeatedly in the throat; someone else takes a knife to the chest; a man’s head explodes into goop when a projectile smashes into it.
As Riya struggles through the facility, she comes across the corpses of her crewmates, soaked in blood and missing sections of their bodies. One man is missing a significant portion of his face, revealing a mess of red underneath.
We see some first-person perspective shots of intense action as someone fights another person to the death. Someone drowns. Someone gets beaten to death. Someone intentionally ingests a deadly chemical.
Later, another character’s face literally gets ripped to the side, hanging from the rest of his head, as Resident Evil-like tentacles burst from what remains of his skull and muscle tissue. A woman tears off a chunk of her neck, though it’s suddenly unharmed a moment later. Creepy crawlies force their way into the ears, noses and wounds of their victims.
A surgical robot works on a couple of Riya’s cuts and wounds (without applying any numbing medication, I might add). In one cringe-inducing scene, it dives deeply into an injury with its metallic parts, causing Riya to scream in pain. Someone sticks his fingers deep into a cut.
We see some jump scares wherein Riya’s crewmate’s faces melt apart into muscle tissue or just goop. Bloodstains splatter many surfaces within the facility.
We hear about 25 uses of the f-word and nine uses of the s-word. There’s one instance of “h—.” Jesus’ name is taken in vain once.
People drink liquor. Riya applies futuristic medical patches to her neck, and they cause her to regain her memories gradually.
We see plenty of jump scares and other unsettling moments, including a scene with many strobing lights.
In interviews for the film, Director Flying Lotus mentioned that his script was influenced more by video games than movies. Specifically, he looked to games such as Dead Space.
And if you’ve played a sci-fi mystery like Dead Space, Returnal or The Callisto Protocol, you may get a bit of that vibe in Ash. Here, our protagonist is thrust into a blood-soaked mystery and forced to put the pieces together—pieces that eventually build to an action-packed climax.
But if we’re comparing Ash to video games, well, this story obviously freighted some of the less visually appealing moments in gaming, too: Riya bumbles around her futuristic research station like a player unsure of how to proceed for an uncomfortably long time. She picks up items and, upon learning that they don’t really progress the story, puts them down. At times, it feels as if she—and we—are just waiting for the movie to realize that she’s stuck and to give her a waypoint marker to the next objective.
But when Riya does reach those objectives, she’s rewarded with gruesome jump scares of her goopy dead colleagues. Or she’s greeted by the smushed head of a body or a room that suddenly got a blood-red paint job. And while there’s no eyeball surgery à la Dead Space 2, a particular surgical scene in Ash evokes a similar feeling to its gaming counterpart. All that stress prompts Riya to utter a slew of f-words.
And all of that content may be enough to make you decide to abort this movie mission, too.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
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