The musician-to-film director pipeline is prevalent in the entertainment industry, spanning generations and perspectives. Figures primarily known for their music, such as Prince, Questlove, and Ice Cube, have made the jump to directing shorts, documentaries, and feature films, all with their own stories to tell.
Fresh off its premiere out of SXSW this past weekend, producer/rapper Steven “Flying Lotus” Ellison joins their ranks with his debut feature film Ash (2025), a challenging descent into the perceived limitations of science-fiction/horror extremes.
After exploring filmmaking with a pair of short films and a segment in V/H/S/99 (2022) (“Ozzy’s Dungeon”), Ellison clearly has a penchant for the avant-garde, which is on full display in Ash’s breathtaking visual presentation. While every facet of Ash’s exterior is of the highest order, the harsh narrative leaps employed in its screenplay clash too often with one another and the end result lacks cohesion.
Ash follows astronaut Riya (Eiza González), who wakes up in her space station to a worst-case scenario situation: Her entire crew has been killed and she has no memory of what happened. Over the course of the film, Riya experiences brutal, terrifying flashbacks as her guide for what happened the night before as a means of jogging her memory.
Soon after, she comes across Brion (Aaron Paul), an outsider answering a distress signal who has a ticking clock plan to get them off the space station, but they have to act fast. Though Riya has no memory of Brion, he insists they know each other and encourages her to trust him. With no other option, the two must work together to escape the inhospitable environment.
Reading through this synopsis, it’s pretty simple to see Ellison draws influences from Ridley Scott (Alien (1979)), John Carpenter (The Thing (1982)), and Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)). However, the presentation of Ash is entirely its own.
Every individual set piece feels like its own creation, dripping with an eerie, disorienting atmosphere, lit with expert precision and enveloping the audience in a sense of looming, multicolored dread.
The production design and effects add a lived-in presence at every turn, despite its budgetary limitations. Every corridor of the station is easy to keep track of, even in the midst of a petrifying situation and a foreign entity slowly making its presence known. All of this tension is set to Flying Lotus’s perfectly curated score, orchestrated and varied throughout, but never growing stale.
The technical craft that Ellison brings to Ash, making every frame a perfect encapsulation of what one should expect of his feature debut, is especially strong after what he brought to his segment in V/H/S/99. If Ash was shortened to the sum of its strongest parts, it might have been a great short film.
Unfortunately, though, Ash suffers from an overly ambitious script (penned by Jonni Remmler, also in a feature debut) that plays with the narrative structure too fast and loose for its own benefit, often reminding us of its influences rather than providing us with a new experience.
The first two-thirds of Ash struggles to find its balance in delivering ample character development in the midst of familiar, slow-burn exploration, juxtaposed against sudden snippets of brutality in Riya’s uncontrolled flashbacks. The film attempts to masquerade itself in an overly showy plot to shelter itself from the fact that its characters are simply familiar types.
In something like the first Alien, Ripley and the crew of Nostromo were all given the individual time necessary to explore their characters, motivations, and personalities, making it all the more distressing and chaotic as they’re slowly picked off one by one.
The characters of Ash are only explored in a blink-and-you-missed-it scene in the film’s opening ten minutes, only to be subjected to the film’s course of events. Though the film thankfully clocks in at a digestible 90 minutes, the truncated runtime almost works to its detriment, as the simple act of survival doesn’t warrant enough investment on its own for a feature.
It’s a shame, too, because Ellison’s presentation and fluidity of the visuals help give Ash a polished sheen of visual prowess. However, the end result only makes up for some of the film’s fundamental flaws.
Review Courtesy of Landon Defever
Feature Image Credit to Shudder via Rolling Stone