Ash Takes A Long Time To Be A Good Movie
Ash Requires So Much Patience From Its Audience
Ash is a good movie in hindsight. The plot is full of interesting ideas and has lots of fun clues to analyze after the fact (though bright lights/flashing warning). But the first parts of the movie—despite its best efforts—are fairly dull for anyone who has some experience with horror storytelling.
The less nice way of stating that is the opening is super cliché. The visuals might be impressive on occasion, but we’ve got someone wandering a spacecraft, unable to recall who she is, and finding all the crew dead. I literally kept saying out loud that it felt like a video game, and that’s because it’s the most generic video game opening ever devised. If sci-fi horror was boiled down to its most stock scenarios, it would be this or “following a distress call.”
The Opening Scenes Of Ash Are Absurdly Generic
And once we’ve established that concept, the story actually gets worse. At least we had environmental storytelling to keep engagement. At least we could speculate on what happened as the character quietly wanders the set. The next section of Ash slides downhill fast into continuous jump scares (which are all in the main character, Riya’s, head), dream sequences (also obviously in her head), and extremely stilted (and weirdly paced) dialog scenes between her and another character. I still very much meant what I said before about the movie really working in hindsight—but there had to be a way to make all of this setup more engaging. We don’t live in a world where you can assume an audience will just trust the film to get better, and I have to assume people who would’ve loved this movie bounced off before they could see (or even guess at) the gory, cerebral, body horror, cosmic horror cascade that rounds out Ash.
But if you’re reading this—and haven’t seen the movie already—then you now know; and you may want to skedaddle before I praise the true form of this movie. The true form being that the creators absolutely knew that they were being cliché and used those clichés to make this into a layered, tricky movie. The color pallet sets the tone that things are going to be surreal, and the longer the movie goes, the more you realize that the main character is being heavily manipulated and nothing we as the audience are seeing is necessarily the whole truth (or even half of the truth). Ash isn’t just pulling one twist; it’s pulling multiple reveals, some of them only given to the audience through quick, brutal details. Cosmic horror stories often revolve around the slow—damaging—understanding of some truth, and Ash delivers that with a dread-filled scene that even got me, and then jumps into chaos, really pushing the special effects, the symbolism, the scope of the story, and yet more until it’s not the same movie you started with; it’s something grotesque and bombastic.
The Last Few Scenes Make This Film Worth Seeing
It does have actual problems that aren’t tied into tricks, though—and I should address them. The biggest ones revolve around the cast. The character count in Ash is huge, and it’s very hard to keep track of who is who until more than half-way through the movie. Two different reveals rely on you knowing them—and I had to really think through the story to even understand. They also somehow still kill one of their Black characters first. I can barely tell you anything about any of these characters (the acting isn’t even always good), besides the general shape of why they’re in space, but he dies before we can know much more than he’s sarcastic.
Ash‘s Characters Are Underdeveloped And Wasted
It’s also not the best-looking movie all the time. I like a lot of the effects; the opening moments of the swirling sky are especially cool. But a horror movie like this needs two things above all to look convincing: its monsters and its gore. And only one passes that test without obvious issues. We see a lot of blood and wounds, and they look great. The scene with a pair of scissors is a messy, frantic splatter. But the monster…arguably the most important moment in the whole film…is mostly disturbing conceptually and loses a lot of its impact the longer you can see it. I love the idea of the human face just kind of hanging off its maw, but even that concept gets lost in the meaty prosthetics and almost-comical fight choreography.
That last complaint is more in hindsight, though. Ash managed to set the tone enough that I wasn’t analyzing the monster in the moment; I was caught up in the tension. I was thinking about how much I liked seeing practical monster effects. And once I was done watching Ash for this review, I was—most of all—just impressed that the film had managed to turn its story around and given me a good time. That I was already tempted to rewatch it to see what foreshadowing I had missed. I do fear if you’ve read this far that you won’t get to experience as much of Ash’s magic as I did, but I also don’t want a horror fan to not know about this film. So, we’re at an impasse there—but, even knowing some of its tricks, I do still suggest you give it a try. It was clearly made by cosmic horror fans for cosmic horror fans.
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