Ash (2025)

Release Date: April 26, 2025
Director: Flying Lotus
Starring: Aaron Paul, Eiza González, Iko Uwais, Kate Lyn Sheil, Beulah Koale

The Plot: Aliens, Head Explosions, and Wasted Potential

I’ll be real with you—Ash was one of my most anticipated watches of the spring. Sci-fi horror, Flying Lotus directing, Aaron Paul and Eiza González? On paper, this should’ve been an absolute banger. Dark, weird, stylish—everything I want in a genre movie.

Instead? What we got was a slow-motion disaster.

The story starts out simple enough: a woman named Ash (Eiza González) wakes up alone on a remote planet research station after an apparent catastrophe. Her crewmates are dead—or worse—and a mysterious rescue worker (Aaron Paul) shows up to help her. But nothing is as it seems. Reality starts bending, bodies start transforming, and soon it's clear there's something alien at work.

Sounds good, right? Except the movie moves at a glacial pace, dragging through endless slow-burn scenes that somehow make the apocalypse feel boring. And then—BAM—out of nowhere, it just starts throwing everything at the wall: hallucinations, gooey alien transformations, and some of the most bizarrely handled head-splitting scenes I've ever seen.

It wants to be atmospheric horror. It ends up feeling like a bad trip you can't wake up from—and not in a cool Mandy(2018) way. In a "why am I still watching this?" way.

The Cast: Wasted Talent

This part really hurts.

Aaron Paul and Eiza González are fantastic actors who deserve so much better than what they were given here. Paul does what he can with a flat, cryptic role, but he's basically stuck playing "mysterious guy who talks slowly" for the entire runtime. You keep waiting for him to crack it open, to show some edge or desperation—but the script never lets him.

Eiza González carries the first half of the movie almost entirely on her back. She's magnetic, even when she's doing nothing but wandering around dark hallways. But even her best efforts can't save dialogue that's so stilted it sounds like it was AI-generated.

Iko Uwais (yes, The Raid’s Iko Uwais!) shows up for about three seconds in a glorified cameo. Why even cast a martial arts legend if you’re not going to let him kick anything? It's baffling.

And Kate Lyn Sheil and Beulah Koale do what they can with their scenes, but they’re not given enough to work with. Nobody is. The movie seems weirdly determined to waste every single talented actor it has.

The Vibe: Trippy Visuals, No Soul

Flying Lotus clearly had a vision. You can feel it in the movie's unsettling soundscape, its bold color palette, its strange, off-kilter camera work. Some of the visuals are genuinely striking—bright sickly greens, endless metallic corridors, bodies that twist and split apart in grotesque ways.

But visuals aren't enough.

The atmosphere is oppressive but empty. There's no heartbeat under all the flashing lights and head trauma. You don’t feel scared, or sad, or even grossed out most of the time—you just feel... detached.

It’s all style, no soul. Which is honestly wild, because Flying Lotus’ last film (Kuso) had plenty of weird soul, even if it was aggressively not for everyone.

Here? It just feels like a high-budget art project that forgot to include a movie inside it.

The Ending: Nonsense, Noise, and More Head Splitting

After a sluggish build-up that feels like watching paint dry in space, Ash suddenly goes fully unhinged in the final 30 minutes. Alien parasites take over bodies. Heads start cracking open like overripe fruit. Characters flip loyalties so fast it feels like a soap opera on meth.

And yet somehow, it still manages to feel boring.

There’s no tension because you don’t care about anybody. No character arcs to get invested in. Just a parade of increasingly gross (and weirdly goofy-looking) alien effects that feel like they belong in a much dumber, trashier movie.

The actual final twist—which I won't spoil—tries to be mind-bending and tragic but lands with a thud because it wasn't earned. It's the cinematic equivalent of pulling the rug out from under someone who already stopped paying attention.

The final shot tries to go for haunting. Instead, it just left me thinking: That's it? That's what we waited for?

Controversy: Hype vs. Reality

The buzz leading up to Ash was strong. Early trailers promised a slow-burn sci-fi nightmare in the vein of Annihilation or Under the Skin. Aaron Paul’s name got genre fans hyped. Flying Lotus’s cult following was ready to call this a masterpiece.

And then… yeah. Not even close.

The main controversy so far has been fans feeling outright misled. People expected psychological horror with some artsy weirdness—not a snoozefest with dime-store alien prosthetics and CGI goo. There’s also been some chatter about whether Flying Lotus had too much creative control, leading to a film that feels completely self-indulgent with no one around to say, "Hey, maybe we need a second draft?"

There’s a sad irony here: Ash clearly had a real budget compared to Flying Lotus’ previous work. It just doesn’t look or feel like it was spent wisely. Audiences expected a cosmic horror trip—and got an awkward, overlong mess instead.

Public Feedback: Brutal

Critics have not been kind. It’s currently hovering around a 23% on Rotten Tomatoes, and audience scores are even lower. Reddit threads are full of people calling it "painfully slow," "a waste of a great cast," and "one of the most disappointing sci-fi movies of the year."

Honestly? They’re not wrong.

It’s rare to see a film that manages to lose both its genre nerds and its indie film lovers simultaneously, but Ash somehow pulled it off.

Final Thoughts: A Deep, Deep Disappointment

I went into Ash wanting to love it. I really did. On paper, it checked every box for me: great cast, cool director, moody sci-fi horror vibes. But the final product was one of the biggest cinematic letdowns I’ve seen in a long time.

Poor execution, terrible pacing, and an avalanche of wasted potential. A shame, because there was something here once—buried under all the slow tracking shots and bad alien puppets.

Final Rating: ⭐⭐ (2/10)

If you’re looking for smart, stylish sci-fi horror… keep looking. This one’s dead on arrival.