Ash is a 2025 sci-fi horror directed and scored by Flying Lotus, the musician otherwise known as Steven Ellison, and it stars Eiza González as Riya, a woman who wakes up on a research station on a distant planet to find her entire crew dead and her own memory wiped. Aaron Paul plays Brion, a man who turns up claiming he's there to rescue her, and the film spends its runtime poking at whether she can trust him. Iko Uwais, Beulah Koale, and Flying Lotus himself round out the crew. On paper, that's a solid setup. In practice, I had a rough time with this one, and I'm going to be honest about why.

Let me start with the thing that defined the entire experience for me. I have never taken acid, I've never been curious about it, and this film has now permanently closed the matter. Watching Ash feels like being strapped into someone else's hallucination for an hour and a half. That's not entirely an accident, because Flying Lotus is a musician first and his whole sensibility is built around trippy, disorienting, sensory overload. There's a detail that explains a lot about the look of this thing: he reportedly taught himself the visual effects by watching YouTube tutorials. You can feel that DIY, throw-everything-at-the-wall energy in every frame, for better and, mostly, for worse.

So, in the spirit of the film, here are my problems with it, roughly in the order they annoyed me.

First, the strobing. Every time the movie launches into one of its extended psychedelic detours, the screen erupts into a barrage of seizure-grade colour flashes. It's exhausting rather than hypnotic, and after the third or fourth round of it I'd stopped being unsettled and started getting a headache.

Second, the medical robot. There's a surgery bot on this station that, for reasons the film never explains, communicates exclusively in Japanese, while the ship's main computer and every human aboard speaks English. It's a baffling, jarring choice that pulled me straight out of the film every time it came up, and no part of the story ever bothers to justify it.

Third, the waste of Iko Uwais. This is a man who is one of the most extraordinary on-screen martial artists alive, the star of The Raid, capable of choreography that leaves audiences breathless. Ash casts him, gives him a sliver of action, and then kills him off as one of the slaughtered crew. Bringing in a talent like that for so little is borderline criminal.

Fourth, and I'll keep this one brief, Aaron Paul did not work for me here.