Ash
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Electronic jazz titan Flying Lotus (birth name Steven Ellison; the grandson of Motown icon Marilyn McLeod, and whose great-aunt was jazz legend Alice Coltrane) is not just of music royalty: he has cemented himself as a contemporary great. After a handful of brain-scrambling albums that test the limits of what can be achieved with production software, avant-garde jazz sensibilities, and the occasional hip hop backdrop, Flying Lotus has proven himself as a thought-provoking musician who has helped shape the electronic scene the past twenty years (Cosmogramma is a personal favourite of mine: a psychedelic, fractal, astral trip that never sounds the same as any other listen). I’ve been front row at a Flying Lotus concert, and his live sets are as much as a mind fuck as his music, with elaborate projection and light shows that will have you rubbing your eyes at astonishment (Flying Lotus had a full-on mask and outfit when I saw him to boot; the whole set felt like I was teleported to a planet from a distant galaxy). Needless to say, Flying Lotus is a strong artist with a keen sense of what kinds of visuals and sounds will warp reality.
Naturally, given the near-synesthetic response his music creates and the aesthetic wormhole of his live shows, Flying Lotus has tried his hand at directing before, most notably with his debut film Kuso. This film is an anthological black comedy in the vein of something Harmony Korine would make: an exposition of a community destroyed after an earthquake, and the post apocalyptic restructuring created by a traumatized and reshaped civilization. In short, Kuso is awful. While I am not a squeamish man and could watch the film, I can still recognize Kuso as one of the most disgusting films I have ever seen, down to the scene of a man’s talking boil performing oral sex on someone else (don’t worry, it makes as much sense in the film as it does without any context). I have no problem with absurdity and atrociousness if there is a purpose being served, but Kuso is an aimless, pointless exercise outside of maybe two sequences that amount to something interesting. It was an awful first attempt at making a film that aimed to be inspired by the scatological, satirical, acid-induced fever dreams of visionary genres like funk music (George Clinton does make an appearance, proving my point). Instead, Kuso is just a mess without a message.
This leads us to the recent release of Ash: Flying Lotus’ second feature film. I can safely say that Ash is better than Kuso, but when the bar is so low that a crushed ant can muster crawling over it, I guess that isn’t really an accomplishment. Ash is a much more serious release by Flying Lotus: a science fiction horror film dealing with an amnesic astronaut named Riya (Eiza González) who is trying to figure out why the rest of her crew on an unknown planet is mysteriously dead. She is met by another astronaut, Brion (Aaron Paul), who is sent to retrieve her, but Riya wants to find out what happened to her and her team. Ash is sewn together with various abstract images and jump scares with the intention of mimicking a broken mind piecing together isolated memories. Instead, Ash feels like a jumbled mess, and not one that feels fun to solve like many other like-minded science fiction films. The answers we do get as the film proceeds feel like snippets of other — and far better — sci-fi classics; it’s one thing that Ash doesn’t fully work, but it’s a bigger disappointment that someone as inspirational and creative as Flying Lotus is capable of making something cliched.
Ash may be a vibe to experience, but its dull story don’t make it worthwhile.
What Ash does have going for it are its aesthetics. Its cinematography game is sharp (even if the special effects range from decent to shockingly cheap, the majority of how Ash is shot is quite nice to look at). Flying Lotus supplies the film’s score (like he did for Kuso as well), and I can’t pretend that these compositions match the quality of his studio albums but what we do get is a series of audible moods that always feel appropriate. It is with these points that I feel like I have arrived at the problem with Flying Lotus’ directorial career thus far. It almost feels like Ash is a secondary thought to the music itself, as if everything we see is meant to match the score and not vice versa. Even if you want to consider Ash a visual album, the music is only so good that it cannot excuse the mundanity of the rest of the film. I can’t state with certainty that this was Flying Lotus’ intention, but it certainly seems that way. His albums are great at cascading from sound to sound and song to song, with a myriad of ideas, textures, and identities bouncing off one another. He has tried to make films that echo this musical capability, but he has clearly not succeeded thus far. Ash is meant to feel like a fragmented puzzle, but it instead feels like test footage exercises hobbled together to make a feature film. I’d appreciate if the film was at least challenging, but Ash has many migraine-inducing moments that are truly quite simple on paper. What are meant to be intense twists or revelatory cues wind up being obvious, dated, or basic, so not once does Ash ever reignite my interest.
That is the main crime here: that Ash is dreadfully boring, to the point of nausea (as if I am in a car that is ever-so-slowly reversing for ninety minutes. At some point, not only will I get motion sickness, but I will have this massive itch for something substantial to happen (hell, even a pothole would liven this trip up). After all that time, I find that I have just wound up at the end of the block, and that my house is still visible from where I sit. I remain unchanged, and I am actually bothered enough to want to leave my car abandoned at the edge of the street as I walk home faster than I drove to that unremarkable spot. Toss some pink-coloured shades over my eyes, and blast some Flying Lotus tunes on the radio during this drive, and this is as accurate as I can be as to what watching Ash feels like. A film this colourful and trippy can never be this boring, and yet — by counter-miraculous measures — Ash is. If there are films that have you on the edge of your seat, I’d call Ash a token “seat-fidgetter”: one that has me squirming out of boredom, and almost digging my nails into my side so I can remember what it means to feel something. There may be some neat camera tricks or unique compositional concepts, but these mean nothing when I couldn’t be less interested in what is happening; if anything, these moments just feel like they’re preventing me from finishing sooner (an awful sign when you are meant to want to see more of these experiments). That’s not a good sign when most of the general public — with far shorter attention spans than hardcore cinephiles — crave the brisk ninety-minute runtime, and Ash makes even that feel like a chore. In short, a great vibe does not make for a great film, and Flying Lotus needs to figure out how to either create a strong narrative or get fully provocative and unique with his cinematic artistry before trying his hand at directing again.
Kuso was a film where Flying Lotus apparently didn’t even try, whereas I can at least admit that Ash feels like an honest effort by the musician; it just isn’t a good one. I feel like there is a great film within a producer and songwriter this interesting, but Ash sure as hell isn’t it (if anything, I am starting to doubt that capability at this point). The story never feels like it matters, and — as a result — none of what we see matters either. Could Ash have been a short film with neat production, visuals, and music? Sure. At ninety minutes, Ash is a stressful watch that never feels like it is ending because it almost never appears to actually be heading anywhere until its final twenty minutes (at this point, I was beyond the point of caring). Now, I hesitate to bring up this response, since I don’t want it to seem like I am accusing Flying Lotus of using such a tool, but Ash certainly resembles what I fear AI-rendered films will feel like: empty concepts that don’t connect with viewers at all. Kuso is a far worse film (believe it or not), but at least I can say that it was repulsive and it angered me. Ash commits the biggest sin of cinema: I felt nothing at all while watching it. I just craved doing something else for most of its runtime. A man whose music has me feeling like I am surfing the cosmos has released a film that has me feeling bothered as I wondered what else I could have done with this time instead (read a novel, gone for a walk, listened to a Flying Lotus album, stab myself fifty times), as if I could see each minute I was wasting being choked to death before my very eyes.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.