Mexican actress Eiza González has long been a fan of the sci-fi genre, and her big dream was to star in a space horror. After the Godzilla blockbuster, the highbrow "Extrapolations" and "3 Body Problem", she finally got a clear and familiar cosmic ho...

Somewhere far from Earth, on another planet, astronaut Riya (Eiza González) regains consciousness. The girl turns out to be the only survivor on the space station, but she doesn't remember why the rest of the crew died. They all once arrived on a mysterious planet called ASH (which translates to "ash") with one goal — terraforming, i.e., creating conditions suitable for human life on this planet. Soon after Riya wakes up, her colleague (Aaron Paul) arrives at the station, trying to convince her to leave the planet. However, Riya resists his persuasion; she wants to find out what really happened and why everyone died.

The sci-fi horror "Ash" is a convoluted story about a deep-space researcher who wakes up one day with no memory, surrounded by dead crew members. It sounds quite intriguing, but the film doesn't have much ideologically great stuff, though it has plenty of style.

The film's director is Steven Ellison, who (so far) has achieved greater fame as a musician under the pseudonym Flying Lotus. He also wrote the soundtrack for his sci-fi. Moreover, if you look closely at the supporting characters, you'll see the director himself in the frame — he played astronaut-researcher Davis. Another fact that becomes obvious about the director is that he is a genre fan. From the first frames, you can catch references to Ridley Scott's iconic "Alien", as well as "Mission to Mars" and "Pandorum". Closer to the middle, you can start pointing at the screen due to recognizing the atmosphere of John Carpenter's "The Thing", but it's given in doses, rather to heighten the intrigue.

References to ideas from iconic sci-fi classics could have worked in the film's favor, but ultimately "Ash" resembles a collage where pieces borrowed from different films are poorly glued together. Moreover, the multiple borrowings from popular cinema make it easy to predict the story's outcome. The script develops in waves, sometimes even with self-repetitions, but closer to the end you realize that everything happens logically overall. However, this does not save the film from often sagging in pace, and the rare jump scares scattered throughout might scare you the first time, but then the procedure turns into repeating a not-so-great joke (though it can't be said the joke is outright terrible).

The not-so-refined and not-so-rhythmic plot is compensated by the musical-visual aesthetics, combining bright — acid, neon, and psychotic — colors, incessant oppressive alarm sounds, and pulsating industrial techno. The choppy editing and sudden flashes of scenes on screen help create relative suspense. This whole atmosphere is complemented by the futuristic design of surrounding objects: from the station's interiors to the brilliant medical robot speaking Japanese.

At the same time, the space station in the film can be compared to a haunted house, where behind multifunctional and high-tech objects various hallucinations or the decomposing bodies of Eiza González's character's colleagues may be hidden. Or a typical idea for such a sci-fi film — criticism of colonialism, with the director trying to add novelty by changing the relationship between subjects and objects. What if the oppressed can fight back and make the colonizers taste their own beliefs? However, in the end, no revelations occur. And the appearance of the final monster (which disappoints either due to poor graphics or an unconvincing battle with the heroine) only worsens the gradually forming disappointment: after all, the film clearly had potential. Thankfully, the runtime of "Ash" is only an hour and a half, so you don't have to suffer long.

In the end, the cosmic horror "Ash" looks like a mix of ideas borrowed from iconic films (and likely popular video games, as authors familiar with the gaming world write). Given the genre's specifics, presenting a truly unique story without looking back at the classics is currently a very difficult task. In such a case, an unusual presentation can help, and Flying Lotus tried hard to use a non-standard approach: "Ash" is visually interesting (let's forget about the monster). Throughout the film, we catch psychotropic hallucinations, as if we ourselves have entered the head of Eiza González's character. However, the "wrapper" fails to save the rhythmically sagging film, just as Eiza González fails to colonize an entire planet alone.

The sci-fi horror "Ash" will be released in Russian theaters on June 19.