When Riya (a steely Eiza Gonzalez) wakes up, bloodied and disoriented, in an empty space station, she doesn’t even remember her own name. As she stumbles through the destroyed station, alarms blaring, all she finds are the terribly mutilated corpses of her crewmates, slaughtered in an apparently violent struggle. When Riya ventures outside the station, she’s engulfed in dust that makes it almost impossible to see, if it weren’t for the awe-inspiring cosmic lights that illuminate a shadowy figure standing in the distance. She waves, and it waves back, as if mimicking her actions. Is it an illusion? A creature native to this planet? She doesn’t have much time to ponder this, as she stumbles back to the station and tries to stop the stabbing pain in her head that is accompanied by terrifying visions of her crewmates’ faces, screaming before melting into terrifyingly inhuman shapes.
The entirety of Ash, the debut feature film from composer-rapper-DJ multihyphenate Flying Lotus, follows Riya just like this, as she pieces together the puzzle of who she is and what happened on that space station. It plays out much like a video game — we wake up with Riya, rummage through the station, and look for clues: a bloody knife there, a hazmat suit here. The nightmarish visions of her crewmates still plague her, but so do brief flashes of her memories of them, eating at the canteen and chatting. But Riya’s investigation into her recent past is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Brion (Aaron Paul, wonderfully opaque), a man who claims to be her fellow crewmate and had been manning the orbital around the planet when he received a distress call from their space station. Riya is uncertain whether she can trust him, but she becomes more uncertain as to whether she can trust herself, as the flashes of her memories start to reveal she may not have been so innocent in the massacre of her crewmates.
