All the pretty colours...
dir: Flying Lotus
2025
This looks like a sci fi flick, but it’s very much a horror flick, just in case the pretty colours and funky music lured you in.
Someone wakes up in some kind of facility, with lots of dead bodies around, and she doesn’t remember what happened, who she is, or what anything is.
What would screenwriters do without amnesia as a plot device? Would they have to actually write cool screenplays that didn’t resort to crutches and timeworn tropes?
That sounds more derisive than I intend it to be. This might be somewhat familiar, and crib certain elements from the Alien films, and probably Carpenter’s The Thing, and elsewhere as well, but it’s well done for what it is. It’s not, to my eye, just an extended film clip from someone who makes music and film clips. There are a number of (predictable) twists, but that doesn’t at all detract from the back half of the flick when shit gets impossibly graphic.
This is a very violent, very gory film, in service of a plot where for the longest time, we, like Riya (Eiza Gonzalez) don’t really get what’s happening. But then we do, and oh gods it’s so awful.
There’s this facility on some planet where humans were hoping they could either relocate the humans from a dying Earth, or find some kind of advancement / technology that could help them back home. The facility would look suspiciously like a New Zealand door factory were it not for the really sexy looking underground bar-like lighting. I didn’t come up with this line, so I can’t take credit for it, but another reviewer referred to it as being the most bisexual lighting ever committed to film. I don’t entirely get what it means but I get what they mean. There are scenes with Aaron Paul’s character of Brion where half his face is bathed in blue gel light, and the other half in red, and you think “wow, this director / cinematographer’s game is really on point”. Or at least that they watched a lot of Dario Argento’s early flicks.
It feels a bit unusual for this kind of flick to feel so carefully crafted. There are times when I regret the level of craft put into some of the horrific imagery and designs. I regret seeing some of that stuff, because it is cosmic horror, the worst kind, and it is now engraved upon my poor brain.
It's still, ultimately, a fight for survival. Riya is determined to figure out, find out what happened between her and the crew, because she keeps having violent flashbacks that kinda imply, it’s not much of any spoiler, that she killed the other members of the crew, including a guy she was in some kind of relationship with, being Kevin (Beulah Koale).
But when Brion turns up banging on the front door, he isn’t someone we’ve seen before in the flashbacks, when everything was good and fine (the brief 5 minutes before everyone died, seemingly). He keeps telling her that the next time a satellite is in the right place, they need to blast off, fuck right off this place, because something something the mission and something something save humanity. Riya is like “yeah nah I have to find out what happened” when what she means is “I need to figure out why I killed everyone.”
That’s something of a burden to carry, or it would be in a different kind of flick. In this flick, Eiza Gonzalez spends a lot of time staring off into the middle distance and looking really, really hungover until she figures it all out. She also has a wound, just above her eyebrow, and it just keeps getting hit, repaired, sutured, banged again and again, in a way that somewhat implies there’s something serious going on with this wound.
In terms of pacing, the flick’s early going is rough, really rough, but it really picks up, or at least goes wacky when the enemy within and without is identified. I’m not going to spoil that bit, because it’s so gross, but I will mention that there are a lot of what look like practical horror effects, as in, physical stuff, amidst the computer generated stuff, that really works well. This could not have had the same budget as something as big (dumb) as Havoc, which I saw at around the same time, but looks so much better.
And really I think that only comes down to the care shown by the person making it, being Flying Lotus, who also has a small role in the flick as Davis, one of the crew who dies early and often.
I can’t claim to know that much about him, in that I know he’s one of them there creative musical types, and I’ve listened to one of his albums, being Yasuke, about the legendary Black samurai, but I can’t say much beyond that. Based on this film I can say he has the chops to deliver on his vision, and has produced something, obviously with the help of countless others, that’s pretty solid, and that would put to shame the efforts of other allegedly more experienced directors.
Plus I have no doubt that he produced the solid musical score throughout the movie on top of all his other duties. I think he made sandwiches for the crew as well, including ones that took into consideration the various dietary and allergy needs of even the most difficult Kiwis on the crew.
Not that it’s their fault, I mean, I’m blaming the victim here, they didn’t ask to have a life threatening or life-complicating allergy or condition, did they? No-one chooses to have coeliac’s or whatever?
So, very considerate, is all I’m saying. Though it should not be forgotten, there are scenes of horrific violence in this flick. Indonesian martial arts legend Iko Uwais as Adhi I believe is like the expedition’s captain, and you’d think that seems like a waste of his arse-kicking talents, but then he has a few scenes of arse-kickery. There are other people in the flick being killed or killing other people, and they all do quite well in their roles.
There is a mystery in the flick, and it’s solved, but the bigger implications of what the crew are confronted with makes the flick seem like it’s going in one direction, but the maker(s) here don’t seem to mind if this flick is a one-off with no sequels, considering a revelation right at the end during the credits. There are more important things than survival, sometimes, apparently.
Visually it’s a trippy horrific journey to a dark and faraway place, and I would beg people not to watch this while on any substances, unless you want some absolutely terrible sights drilled into your psyche. Overall I would categorise it as the kind of experience you might enjoy if you’re one of them there sickos what likes oodles of horror in their sci-fi, like an unholy smoothie with heaps of gore in it.
I will point out what my absolute favourite subsidiary ‘character’ is in the flick, which is a device, an appliance, Japanese in origin, that does helpful medical scanning and surgery where required. The continual upbeat Japanese service industry voice, coupled with its mixture of old looking tech with new seeming super abilities is absolutely hilarious / horrible / horripilating. I love that it asked for a star rating after performing a particularly excruciating-looking surgery. It’s the secret star of the whole movie.
Ash is… what it is, and what it is, is a reminder that humans going anywhere off planet is a terrible idea, fraught not only with peril, but with the likelihood that our hubris will doom us all.
7 times that’s a cheery message for the whole family out of 10
“This is our planet. We have invested too much to let you have it.” – sunk cost fallacy right there - Ash
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