‘Ash’ review: An alien threat with a sting of recognition

Who can’t wait to live on other planets? Second thoughts may be in order after seeing the woolly sci-fi-horror trip “Ash” from Grammy-winning L.A. music guru-turned-director Flying Lotus (a.k.a. Steven Ellison), who spins a bare-bones game of cosmic survival with true sound-and-image flair and an unbridled enthusiasm for the strange beauty of mutant gore.

That this modestly budgeted freak-out was assembled by a fusion artist, someone expert at scoring your daydreams and nightlife, is never in doubt. In fact, as we become oriented to the movie’s space station on the titular planet, where crew member Riya (Eiza González) awakens bloodied and confused by the grim reality that her colleagues have been brutally murdered, the sputtering fluorescent hues, jarring memory flashes and woozy electronic tones that accompany her tour of the premises suggest the remnants of a bad rave night as much as they do an interstellar mission gone terribly wrong.

Early on in Jonni Remmler’s screenplay, there’s a brief flashback to the outpost’s five-person team hanging out, teasing each other about what their Neil Armstrong-like statement is going to be and hinting at their exploratory aims for humankind. (Surprise, surprise: Earth’s becoming uninhabitable.) The men — stoic Capt. Adhi (Iko Uwais) and good-natured Kevin (Beulah Koale) and Davis (Ellison) — seem to take their task seriously, while hard-edged Clarke (Kate Elliott) appears to be the wisecracker and Riya appears simultaneously no-nonsense and cynical.

That’s it for movie chitchat, however. The director, in sync with his cinematographer, Richard Bluck, would much rather spend his energies pulling you through a moodily lighted, otherworldly gauntlet of aftermath menace, kaleidoscopic starscapes and flashbacks that hint at a suddenly amnesiac Riya’s role in the slaughter, than let you get too caught up in portrayal details or plot mechanics.

Still, the mystery of what went down increasingly animates Riya (and us), especially after a guy named Brion (Aaron Paul, reliably grave) suddenly shows up, having answered the distress call sent to his orbiting spacecraft. He wants to convince her to pay more attention to worsening oxygen levels and to salvage the mission by getting the hell out. But as her memories start to return, more is revealed about the real threat, which turns out to be very much the kind of penetrative threat an in-his-prime John Carpenter would have mightily enjoyed turning into the stuff of our crunchy, squishy nightmares.

The legacy of “Alien” is there, of course, in the Ripley parallels, but Carpenter nods are too — especially “The Thing” and a “Halloween”-like emergence from an out-of-focus background. (It may be why the terror titan warranted a place in the end-credits thank-yous.) The thrumming score too is decidedly influenced by the pulsating synth themes of Carpenter, with some of Angelo Badalamenti’s melodic melancholia thrown in for good measure. But the soundtrack is also its own evocative work of intoxicating techno-brood, one that could be piped from your car speakers to readily turn any routine neighborhood errand into a suddenly ominous excursion. Just as playing parts of Bernard Herrmann’s “Vertigo” score instantly gives you the feeling you’re tailing the car ahead of you.

“Ash” is categorically a vibe more than it is an especially unique story or illuminating character study, even if González’s steely beauty conveys plenty about the psychological stakes at hand. But in this age of expensive and overwrought world-building, it’s Ellison’s experiential care with well-worn material that delivers the goods. There’s also something resonant in an Afrofuturist take on colonialist sci-fi, one that marks its narrative space with such a potent mix of planetary wonder, identity peril and alien violence. It’s refreshing to be reminded from movies like this that we should always be asking: Who’s doing the invading, again?