Curator Watchlist
A moody, visually ambitious sci-fi horror that clearly has ideas and atmosphere, but it seems to struggle with pacing, coherence, and payoff. If you’re here for trippy cosmic dread, practical-gore flashes, and a strong audiovisual vibe, it may land; if you want a tightly plotted thriller, it likely won’t.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 35m
Director: Flying Lotus
Starring: Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais
On the mysterious planet of Ash, Riya awakens to find her crew slaughtered. When a man named Brion arrives to rescue her, an ordeal of psychological and physical terror ensues while Riya and Brion must decide if they can trust one another to survive.
Flying Lotus
Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais
A moody, visually ambitious sci-fi horror that clearly has ideas and atmosphere, but it seems to struggle with pacing, coherence, and payoff. If you’re here for trippy cosmic dread, practical-gore flashes, and a strong audiovisual vibe, it may land; if you want a tightly plotted thriller, it likely won’t.
Ash is the kind of sci-fi horror that arrives with a strong mood and a shaky grip on its own machinery. The premise is classic isolation terror, but the film leans hard into disorientation, flash-fragmented dread, and a grimy, psychedelic texture that will either feel immersive or frustrating depending on your tolerance for ambiguity.
What seems to work best is the audiovisual attack: the score, the lighting, and the creature-effects energy all suggest a filmmaker chasing a very specific, very tactile strain of space horror. When it clicks, it has the nasty, pulpy charge of a midnight movie; when it doesn’t, the movie can feel like it’s stalling on atmosphere instead of building momentum.
For viewers who like their horror weird, corrosive, and a little bit unhinged, there’s enough here to justify a watch. For everyone else, the film’s uneven pacing and familiar genre beats may make the experience feel more like a promising experiment than a fully satisfying ride.
john (1★) · 1187 likes
More like “Ass.”
Kit Lazer (3★) · 763 likes
We have John Carpenter at home (complementary)
joe (3.5★) · 734 likes
gross cosmic space horror is back baby!!! atmospheric and trippy as fuck. worth watching in the theater alone for the psychedelic visuals & incredible score. shudder is really giving us the goods lately 🌀🪐
Kevflix And Chill (2.5★) · 561 likes
Ash is a frustratingly uneventful slow burn that finally wakes up in the final act—just in time to salvage some of the face-melty, ooey-gooey sci-fi horrors it spends the first hour and change only teasing through fleeting, non-sequitur flash jumpscares. Flying Lotus wears his influences loudly, but instead of synthesizing them into something fresh, the film mostly drifts through a haze of familiar beats without any urgency. The script somehow manages to be both incoherent and entirely predictable, which is… more
Haunted Hippie (3.5★) · 488 likes
Mind fuck gross out horror on the silver screen??? In this economy?? We’re so back
A lean, polished space-horror thriller with creature-feature tension and a similarly claustrophobic survival setup.
For viewers who want restrained, mission-based sci-fi dread that builds unease through isolation and uncertainty.
Shares the trapped-in-deep-space panic, memory gaps, and escalating physical terror.
A tough, efficient survival horror film that turns a hostile environment and mistrust into genre fuel.
A benchmark for occult-tinged, hellish space horror with a strong sensory identity.
Not a direct match in plot, but it overlaps in cosmic scale, pressure-cooker tension, and eerie audiovisual design.
A compact, lonely sci-fi thriller built on identity, isolation, and psychological unraveling.
For audiences drawn to surreal, unsettling science fiction that favors mood, mutation, and ambiguity.
The definitive paranoia-and-body-horror survival movie, with trust collapsing under extreme conditions.
If the appeal is disorientation and creeping unreality, this delivers a similarly unstable descent.
A classic for viewers who respond to grotesque physical transformation and tragic horror.
Shares the invasive, psychological, flesh-forward intensity and a cold, hostile mood.
isolation, paranoia, trust and betrayal, cosmic horror, body horror, survival, psychological terror, identity under pressure
science fiction horror, cosmic dread, space survival, psychological thriller, body horror, slow burn, surreal visuals, practical effects, atmospheric, gory