“Ash” (2025) operates at the hazy intersection of truth and imagination, making it often hard to decipher. It shows the world through the eyes of a female astronaut, stuck in a spaceship on a distant planet, unable to remember most of her past. She crosses paths with a man who helps her find her footing. However, nothing is as it seems in this survival thriller that shows her struggle to find a way out of her misery. The film remains elusive for most of its duration, hoping to help us understand her anguish and mental chaos. However, it relies heavily on its sound design and hypnotizing music, which doesn’t come as a surprise since the film is helmed by record producer Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison), who has often ventured into these exact realms through his music.
Spoilers Ahead
Ash (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
“Ash” is a sci-fi psychological survival thriller written by Jonni Remmler and directed by Flying Lotus. It follows female astronaut Riya, who finds herself on another planet in the wake of a bloody massacre, unable to remember how she got there or how it all happened. So, it follows the story through an unreliable narrator, trying to make sense of it all.
What happens in ‘Ash’ by Flying Lotus?
“Ash” isn’t just about what Riya (Eiza González) learns along the way, but also about ‘how’ she learns it. The film hinges on her sense of discovery. So, instead of following the events chronologically, let’s follow how she realizes what happened to her. As said before, she finds herself on a neon-drenched spaceship on an unknown planet. She sees some dead bodies and a lot of blood around her, but can barely recognize them, let alone how they got brutally injured. Through brief visions, she sees flashes of what might be her past, which include similarly wounded faces. Her inner voice tells her that “it’s all her fault.”
Riya walks outside to find a figure mimicking her movements, but can’t understand whether that’s an actual person or just a figment of her imagination. She struggles to make her way back to the ship and loses consciousness since the oxygen levels are depleting inside the ship. While unconscious, she recalls having a meal with Adhi (Iko Uwais), Kevin (Beulah Koale), Clarke (Kate Elliott), and Davis (Flying Lotus). It makes her realize that she might be on this planet to colonize it and to ensure it is habitable for humans.
Under Captain Adhi’s command, they had come fairly close to finding Oxygen levels close to what’s necessary for human survival. However, none of it helps her realize how she or her colleagues got injured. Did someone infiltrate their crew? Or did she attack them? She is not sure about anything. That’s when she finds another puzzle to solve.
Who is Brion, and what does he want from Riya?
Riya notices a movement in the exterior airlock where a person seeks her help. She rescues him but immediately attacks him since she doesn’t remember who he is and what he wants from her. He might just be an intruder who killed her crew. However, she soon realizes he is Brion (Aaron Paul), one of her crew members — the same person her crew mentioned in her memory. Brion says he was orbital monitoring and realized a distress code. He also claims that Clarke had a psychotic episode that led her to turn on her crewmates, leading to the massacre.
Since Riya can’t even recall her life on Earth, Brion reveals that they are one of the crews trying to find viable Earth-sized planets. They are on KOI-442, and he was outside, fulfilling his duties. However, since they are running out of Oxygen to breathe, he hopes to return to the orbital soon. Unlike him, Riya is curious to know more about how her crew got killed. She also does not want to leave Clarke behind. With a bot’s help, she plays an old recording that shows Davis getting injured during a mission, which leads them to a mysterious incident.
Brion knew about this accident but still didn’t tell her because he wanted her to focus on their greater mission and not spend time decoding what went wrong. So, he gives her some patches to use that can help her be in the moment and function properly instead of getting bogged down by her past. In his absence, she crosses paths with Clarke, who looks like she is under some sort of influence. Riya pacifies her but doesn’t find the root of her bizarre transformation. In The Orbital, she realizes that another person has died because of blunt force trauma, caused by Brion.
Ash (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Why does Riya lose most of her memories?
Riya loses her memories, likely due to a blunt force trauma from an attack. However, that happened after the crew got in contact with a pathogen that could take control of their bodies and minds. It got into the mainframe and the airlock of the ship, putting the crew’s lives in danger. During the course of their mission, the pathogens may have observed human behavior to learn how to control them. By the time Riya realizes this and the fact that the pathogens could self-replicate, they take charge of Adhi’s body, followed by Kevin’s.
Under the influence, Kevin attacks Riya. So, in her memories, she is trying to protect herself even though they are lovers. The pathogen injures Clarke and takes control of Brion’s mind and body. So, the Brion that Riya met after the attack is actually his infected body. At the time, the pathogen also entered her body, which is possibly why she lost her memories of the incident and her life on Earth.
In the final moments of “Ash,” Riya uses the bot to exhume that parasite. It helps her remember the things that she could not do after the accident. After the surgery, Riya tries to escape, but the infected Brion stops her along the way. She defeats him by burning his body, which also lights up their ship on fire. Within moments, she escapes the ship and the planet.
Who is the real parasite?
Toward the end, the pathogens reveal that they are trying to eliminate the aliens, such as Riya and her crew, knowing the human tendency for self-destruction. They do not want humans to ruin their planet as they ruined the Earth. So, they take over the human bodies and manipulate them into killing themselves, effectively sabotaging their end goal of bringing humans there. In this context, they become parasites in human bodies. However, their critique makes humans just as parasitic, since they are latching on to the resources of another planet, hoping to secure their futures while potentially destroying the hope for others.
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