“Beam Me Up, But Only If You Explain the Plot: Ash (2025)”

A woman wakes up on a distant planet and finds the crew of her space station viciously killed. Her investigation into what happened sets in motion a terrifying chain of events.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4xFjHIzFzM

I don’t know about you, but waking up on a foreign rock hurtling through space only to find your coworkers turned into cosmic crumpets is my idea of a solid Saturday night. Enter Ash, the latest sci-fi thriller that straps you into a titanium chair, injects you with 90 minutes of atmospheric dread, and then proceeds to play hopscotch with your brain’s timeline. It’s like Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey had a love child who got lost in a raver’s warehouse party—equal parts gorgeous and utterly disorienting.

I’m a Sci-Fi junkie—if you slapped a neural link into my brain and forced me to binge Star Trek backwards, I’d still say, “Beam me up, Scotty, I need more.” So I rolled into Ash with stars Eiza González, Aaron Paul, and Iko Uwais shining on the marquee like beacons of hope. Eiza wakes up on this far-flung station, hair tousled just enough to sell that “I just drifted through hyperspace” vibe, and immediately discovers every other soul has been, let’s say, “aggressively repurposed.” Aaron Paul shows up to remind us why we loved him in Breaking Bad, and Iko Uwais crashes in to kick serious intergalactic behind. It’s a cast that promises fireworks—and for the most part, delivers cosmic sparklers.

Visually, Ash is an absolute stunner. Director Flying Lotus calls the shots and every frame looks lifted from an art gallery exhibit on “Postmodern Space Dystopia.” Your retina will thank you for the eye candy—sick nebulas pulsing outside the viewport, corridors lit like a Tron nightclub, and textures so crisp you could shave with them. It had moments where I swear I caught a wink at Alien—the shadows stretched just right, the metal corridors hummed like a lurking predator, and I half-expected a facehugger to vault out of a maintenance shaft. Then there were flashes of 2001, where a sleek pod drifts past, silence stretching long enough for you to Google “What the hell is going on?”

Yet, for every visual high, there’s a narrative dip that feels like stumbling off a cliff—because Ash isn’t content to just tell one story. No, it’s decided to hopscotch through time in that “non-linear” storytelling style that feels like someone skimped on renting the film stock. One minute you’re in the “present,” the next you’re seeing Eiza’s character having tea with…. well, I’m still not sure who. It’s like I was watching Memento on NyQuil—occasionally brilliant, mostly blurry. And while I admire narrative ambition—give me a plot that respects my brain cells, please.

Costuming merits a mention, or perhaps a head scratch. Sometimes our intrepid heroine and her cohorts strut around in outfits that look like they came from a sci-fi runway show rather than a realistic space station. I can buy spandex in zero-G for style points, but come on—no thermal regulator? No helmet seal? It’s like trying to fly a Cessna with flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt. The apparel may be Instagram-worthy, but if oxygen were black gold, those outfits wouldn’t last two minutes once decompression hit.

Now, Aaron Paul—bless his meth-cooked soul—brings his trademark intensity. He paces corridors like a caged lion, all “Say my name” energy, except here it’s “Tell me what you saw.” Iko Uwais arrives midway with the sort of martial prowess that makes you go, “Hey, I thought this was a thriller, not The Raid in space!” His fight choreography is slick enough to justify his inclusion, but feels shoehorned into a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit.

First-person camera work is the rebellious teenager of filmmaking choices—it thinks it’s edgy, but mostly it just gives you motion sickness. One minute you’re convinced you’re there, the next you’re gripping your seat, praying you don’t invent vertigo. We get it: you want us to feel the fear. But there’s “immersive” and then there’s “stop rotating the camera like it’s a fidget spinner.” A lighter touch would have sufficed.

Dialogue? Thin. Barely there. You’ve seen more substance in a politician’s tweet. One character says to another, “We have to find out what happened.” Groundbreaking. I’m pretty sure I could have written a more nuanced line while brushing my teeth. And the editing—my god—the quick cuts felt like a soul-crushing TikTok binge. You blink, and you’ve missed an entire scene.

That said, when Ash lands a moment, boy does it land. There’s a sequence where Eiza’s character discovers something, and the haunting audio overlay drips dread like wet ink—truly unsettling. I found myself leaning forward in my seat, engaged, invested, willing to care about her fate… until the timeline jumped yet again and I was scratching my head.

Ultimately, Ash is a Gorgeous Mess™—a film that dazzles your eyeballs and then lunges for your will to follow along. It’s ambitious, but at the cost of coherence. It’s like they poured a bucket of brilliance and a bucket of bewilderment into the same cosmic blender, hit “Frappé,” and served it up with a side of disorientation.

So, after this twisted joyride through fractured time, spinning cameras, and outfits that defy the laws of physics, where does that leave us? If you crave artistry and aren’t too fussed about following the breadcrumbs, you might find Ash a trippy visual feast. If you like your stories linear, your dialogue substantial, and your editing slow enough to read the fine print, you might want to catch this one on a streaming service with a “Skip Intro” button.

In the grand pantheon of sci-fi flicks, Ash hovers somewhere between “visually arresting art-house oddity” and “narrative discard pile.” I applaud the ambition, but lament the execution. At the end of the day, Ash is more flame-out than fire-starter.

Rating: 5.5/10