Ash is a 2025 science fiction horror film that has clearly been inspired by video games of the genre, in particular Dead Space and even the newer Callisto Protocol, to some extent. The plot follows an astronaut named Riya, who wakes up to find all her team members brutally killed aboard their space station, which is set on a planet far away from Earth, and follows her journey of retracing the events from the recent past as she tries to figure out what exactly went down. Although the visual splendor and the use of high-contrast colors make it quite a treat to look at, Ash is extremely boring and lazily convoluted at most times, making it evident that the concept had actually been of a music video for rapper Flying Lotus, who is also the director of the film
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
Ash begins with an astronaut waking up from what seems to have been a horrific nightmare, confused about why she is lying on the floor of her cabin and why the emergency lights in the space station are flashing red and green. As the astronaut, Riya, gets up and leaves her cabin with only a flashlight in her hand, things seem eerily off and extremely dangerous. From the deep wound on her own head, which is still bleeding lightly, to the marks and splatters of blood all over the walls of the space station, it is very evident that someone or something had attacked Riya and her crew, and she tries to gauge the extent of the damage that had been caused. She follows a trail of blood to find the dead body of one of her crewmates, which is still sitting upright against a wall, and Riya even has to pull a knife out of its chest. She then decides to step out of the space station to check on the situation outside, on the planet officially named KOI-442.
Here, amidst what seems to be snow falling from the sky and the grim light on the surface of the planet, Riya sees a dark figure in the distance, which is not always visible. As she approaches the figure and calls out to it, the latter reciprocates all her actions, as if mirroring the movement of her hands and even her physical appearance. It is only out of sheer luck that Riya suddenly realizes that she has walked up dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, and a couple more steps would have made her drop down into a deep gorge. She also suddenly starts to feel a choking sensation, which grows with every passing second, and it is clear that the air on the surface of the undiscovered planet can only be breathed for a short amount of time. The astronaut has to run back into the space station, and probably because of the hallucination caused by the toxic air outside, she starts to have hallucinations regarding the death of her crew members.
The computer system on the space station had been blaring for all this time, reminding Riya that the systems had malfunctioned and needed to be reset. Once she completes the reset and gets most of the power and facilities back up and running, there is a new warning about abnormal activity being detected inside the station. Riya gathers the courage to go check on what this intruder could be and is shocked to see a man, in full astronaut attire, inside the station. She does not hesitate to physically attack the man, only for him to beg her to stop and reveal that he is Brion, the astronaut who had been in charge of orbital monitoring. Brion says that he had returned from his usual orbital monitoring position after having received a distress signal from the space station and is now terribly surprised to see only Riya alive. With every passing second, it seems likely that a theory dangled in front of us from the beginning of the film might be true after all—that Riya is the one who had killed her crew members, for some odd reason.
What are the astronauts doing on KOI-442?
Almost everything about Ash, except for its truly unique visual style, is bound to remind viewers of some other already existing films and video games, and so its plot is really no different either. We only get a general idea about what the astronauts are doing on planet KOI-442, millions of lightyears away from their home planet of Earth, and that too only through the dialogue. The living conditions on Earth had tremendously deteriorated, most definitely due to overpopulation and the depletion of resources of all kinds, because of which human beings had to look for new planets to live on. As scientific technology and space research had tremendously advanced by this time, for the film clearly takes place in the future, astronauts were able to build mobile space stations that could go to the far depths of the universe in search of habitable planets.
It is for this very reason that Riya’s crew, named the 7F, had been sent on long expeditions in outer space and had recently stationed themselves on KOI-442 after learning there was the possibility of finding habitable conditions on the planet. In fact, the previous 6 expeditions had all failed, and so a lot of hope rested on the crew members of the 7F, for their brave efforts were necessary for saving humankind from guaranteed extinction. After selecting planet KOI-442 for further research, the team had set up their space station on it to search every nook and cranny of its surface for hospitable conditions. Apart from this background information, there is simply nothing else mentioned about the current conditions on Earth, and the characters also never establish communication with anyone on their home planet.
Therefore, when a crevice with conditions hospitable for humans was found inside a crevice on KOI-442, the team had celebrated it as a tremendous success and had believed that their work would surely help the rest of the population on planet Earth. However, these conditions were not naturally present at the place but had clearly been fabricated and manufactured, for an atmosphere hospitable for human and other life had been created inside chambers deep underground, evidently by some higher life form. But right after this groundbreaking discovery had been made, a terrible explosion took place near the crevice, and it instantly killed one of the astronauts, Davis. Following this incident, the crew also started noticing some odd growth of plants and moss inside their space station, which indicated that they had carried back some sort of life form with them. From then on, the main intention of the crew was to leave the space station and return to Earth, even if that meant abandoning their mission.
Was Riya really the perpetrator behind the murders?
When Brion finally reveals himself to be the antagonist, he literally drives his fingers into the wound on Riya’s head, and this seemingly shows her what had happened in the past. After the parasites had gotten into the space station in the form of plants and mosses, they had eventually developed into a bug that could move around by itself. This bug then supposedly got into the body of one of the astronauts, and as it took full control of the man’s body, he started attacking his crew members one after another. An intense fight took place, in which Riya was also terribly injured. At the end of the fight, Riya managed to kill the infected astronaut, who also happened to be her love interest, but could not really deal with the parasite inside him. Thus, the parasite clambered out of the man’s body and forcibly entered hers through the deep wound on the side of her head.
The parasite then took control of her mind and started showing her visions, along with making her feel guilty for having killed the rest of her crew. Although the medical aid computer that keeps showing up throughout the film shows that Clarke did not have any traces of the parasite in her body, it does not mean that Riya had blindly killed her colleagues under the influence of the parasite. This is because the external being always leaves the human body once the latter is dead, and so there would naturally be no trace of it in Clarke’s body. The parasite simply wanted to take over human civilization as well, for which it needed to travel back to Earth, and it chose Riya to be its host. This is why it kept showing her a projection of its own self, in the form of Brion, who kept insisting that Riya should take the next shuttle back to her home planet. Therefore, Riya does not seem to be the perpetrator behind the murder of her crewmates, and Brion, or at least the version of him that we see, is actually the same parasite that had killed the astronauts.
What is the nature of the alien being in the film?
Ash obviously has an alien entity in its plot, and it is not apparently just a single entity but a whole community, just like human beings. It is unclear whether the parasites themselves are the entity or whether the parasites are being controlled by the aliens, and the only visual representation of the antagonistic alien species is through a red eye. This eye seemingly exists inside Riya’s brain when we see it, as it tries to take over her mind and also communicate with her in the process. Initially, the alien species seemed to be just fighting back against the intrusion of the humans, as they did not want to share their resources and whatever they had built to sustain their life.
However, by the end, it seems like the aliens are intent on ruling over humankind as well, and this is why they take control of Riya in order to hatch a plan to infiltrate Earth in retaliation. In some ways, this ferocious alien species does resemble human beings, and it is possible to think of them as an extremely advanced form of humankind that has evolved, or devolved, into parasites. Not only are they tremendously violent and bloodthirsty, but also supremely manipulative and intelligent, which makes them far superior to the astronauts from Earth. The species is also aware of humans, as the parasite mentions the human race, calling us inefficient and uninventive, which means that they had either been tracking the astronauts right from when they landed on KOI-442 or from even before, running their own research into Earth from afar.
Did Riya finally escape the space station?
Although Riya is dangerously infected by the parasite, she manages to maintain some control over her mind and body, and she fights back terribly hard to rip off an infected patch of her skin. Riya then rushes to the medical aid computer and gets herself scanned, confirming that she is indeed infected by the parasite, and despite knowing that it can kill her, she goes ahead with the surgery to remove the foreign object from her body. The surgery is successful, but the alien parasite puts up one last fight, in the form of Brion, who had actually died many hours earlier when he had indeed been called back from the orbital monitoring station.
In Ash’s ending, Riya has to defeat Brion, who turns into a parasitic monster during the fight, and has to burn down the entire space station in order to escape her ordeal. She then takes the next shuttle back to the base station, possibly intending to return to her home planet. Although we do not see Riya get anywhere close to Earth, she does triumphantly escape planet KOI-442, while memories of her colleagues and friends flash in front of her eyes. The ending of Ash suggests that Riya does manage to get rid of the parasite and also escape the space station to return to safety.
