Entertainment
Perfect New, R-Rated Sci-Fi Thriller Is A Deep-Space Psychological Slaughter
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Have you ever woken up the day after a crazy night out with little recollection of what happened the night before, how you got home, or who you interacted with? This is a safe place. It’s okay to admit that we’ve all been irresponsible at one point or another, and this is a pretty common story. You check your bank account and cringe at how much the surge-priced Uber ride home cost, then feel physically sick when you realize that despite your inebriated state you still ordered pizza for delivery. The same pizza that’s now sitting at your front door, untouched and uneaten.
While what I’m describing sounds like a college student blacking out after going a little too hard on a bar crawl, it’s not far off from what happens in 2025’s Ash, a sci-fi horror thriller centered on a disoriented protagonist who wakes up with no memory of what happened to her crew, why they’re all dead and she’s not, or what she did to end up in this situation. In this case, though, there was no party. Instead, there’s a mind-controlling alien infection that pushes its hosts toward violence. The anxiety is exactly the same, though. She was living her life, blacked out, woke up, and now has to deal with the consequences of whatever the hell happened at her station.
The Worst Kind Of Blackout
Ash does an excellent job forcing Riya’s (Eiza Gonzalez) anxiety onto the audience through her fractured memories and disoriented state as she wakes up to discover that everyone aboard her ship is dead. She doesn’t know who killed her crew, but she has flashes of violent confrontations that feel like out-of-body experiences. She digs through ship logs and crew notes, trying to piece together a chain of events that makes sense, but there’s simply too much missing information for her to form a coherent narrative.
When Riya is greeted by Brion (Aaron Paul), things begin to fall into place, at least on the surface. Brion explains that they’re stationed on a mysterious, Earth-like planet known as K.O.I-442, nicknamed Ash, and that the crew succumbed to a deadly alien substance that compromised the mission by overriding their behavior. Brion claims he observed the chaos from a distance, but now needs to understand exactly what Riya saw or did in order to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to this outcome.
Brion knows the crew died violently, but still has no clear explanation for how Adhi (Iko Uwais), Kevin (Beulah Koale), Catherine Clarke (Kate Elliott), and Shawn Davis (Flying Lotus) met their bloody ends. Brain scans and memory tests slowly suggest that Riya herself is responsible for the carnage, though the evidence points toward defensive actions rather than premeditated violence. The crew had been infected, and the infection makes its hosts unpredictable and aggressive.
As more memories resurface in Ash, Riya grows increasingly unsure whether Brion’s version of events is reliable. She becomes fixated on the fact that he only arrives after everyone else is already dead, which raises uncomfortable questions about his timing and motives. Unsure whether she can trust Brion or even her own fractured mind, Riya is left to piece together the previous days on her own, spiraling further as the details refuse to lock into place.
Low-Budget Sci-Fi Horror Done Right
Though the exact financials are not widely available, Ash has been reported to have been produced on a modest budget of around $500,000, and that restraint works in its favor. The film tells a harrowing, isolated story with very few locations, effectively functioning as a bottle movie set in deep space. Limited environments, flashing warning lights, and malfunctioning computer systems do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to generating tension and dread as Riya struggles to understand how her entire crew was wiped out.
Eiza Gonzalez and Aaron Paul elevate the premise through their effortlessly uneasy on-screen chemistry. They’re forced to operate as allies even though Riya has every reason to be suspicious of Brion, the only other person she can interact with. Communications are down, the station is compromised, oxygen is running low, and Brion seems far more interested in sedating her and running tests than in finding a clear escape plan. That imbalance keeps the tension simmering in every shared scene.
The violence in Ash is sparse but effective. Most of the bloodshed appears in fleeting fragments through Riya’s resurfacing memories, letting the audience imagine what happened rather than laying it all out explicitly. It’s a smart low-budget decision. You don’t need to show the monster in full until it’s absolutely necessary, and that restraint keeps the illusion intact.
Ash follows familiar genre rhythms seen in films like Alien and Underwater, but it never feels like a carbon copy. Its claustrophobic dread comes from uncertainty rather than constant action, forcing the viewer to sit with unanswered questions. As Riya slowly reconstructs the truth behind her situation, you’re left to determine what actually happened, who can be trusted, and whether there’s even a viable way home once the dust settles.
Ash is currently streaming on Hulu.
Entertainment
CareerSprinter Pro combines résumé and interview tools for $49.99
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Mashable Deals
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The Pro Plan removes all limits. Subscribers enjoy unlimited résumé enhancements, salary research, mock interviews, and priority support. This appeals to active job seekers, career switchers, recent graduates, or professionals returning to the workforce who expect to run several applications at once.
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Mashable Deals
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Entertainment
Perfect, R-Rated Comedy Thriller Will Infiltrate And Destroy Your Life
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Working as an office drone is the worst possible way to spend your time, especially if your doppelganger is showing up for work, running circles around you, and tarnishing your good name. Not only does Jesse Eisenberg’s doppelganger do all of these things in 2013’s The Double, nobody else at work seems to notice that his primary antagonist is his exact body double. It’s a bleak reminder of how little your coworkers actually pay attention to things like who they’ve been working with for the past seven years, what they look like, and what they do for a living.
After thinking about it for a minute, it’s not even that far-fetched of a scenario. Having to wear a shirt and tie, commute to a central office, and sit in a cubicle inside a windowless room, all while attending meetings that could have been an email, only to be rewarded with a slice of room-temperature pizza left over from yesterday’s sales meeting, is more than enough to suck the soul right out of you and turn you into a shell of a man who locks in without soaking in their surroundings.
While The Double is clearly an unrealistic story, what’s depicted here doesn’t feel that far removed from what office culture could easily devolve into over the next decade.
An Office That Makes Office Space Look Like A Beach Paradise
Set mostly in oppressively dank apartment buildings, corner offices, and cubicles, The Double centers on Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), an office drone of the highest order who’s wandering aimlessly through life. Though everyone at the office works for a cold-hearted authority figure known only as The Colonel (James Fox), it’s never made entirely clear what anyone actually does for a living. It’s obvious they’re clerks for some wide-reaching, dystopian government agency, but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.
This level of impersonality in The Double feeds directly into its central conflict. Simon frequently forgets his ID badge and is never recognized by the security guards or his coworkers. He has to sign a visitor’s form just to go to work, as if he barely exists. Simon feels this same kind of invisibility when it comes to his coworker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who lives in the apartment building across from him but doesn’t even know he’s there. He admires her from afar, often collecting her torn-up art projects and saving them in a notebook for himself.
It’s a lonely existence for Simon James, until he meets his doppelganger, James Simon (also Jesse Eisenberg), who appears out of nowhere and suddenly starts working at the same office.
James Simon is everything Simon James is not in The Double, which immediately creates a number of problems. Simon is shy, reserved, and lacking confidence, content to blend into the background and quietly move through life. James, on the other hand, is charming, assertive, and instantly recognized as a standout employee, despite doing similar work to Simon, who barely gets acknowledged by anyone. Slowly but surely, James begins intruding on Simon’s life, eventually earning Hannah’s affection, much to Simon’s dismay. To make matters worse, nobody at the office seems to notice that Simon James and James Simon are identical, calling Simon’s grip on reality into question.
As Simon spirals, he gets to know James better, and the two even swap places on occasion in an attempt to live in each other’s shoes. These exchanges usually backfire, further straining their already toxic relationship and forcing Simon to question what it even means to be alive.
Sounds Like Another Movie That Came Out At The Same Time
Based on the 1846 novel of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double shares a similar premise with 2013’s Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. While it might be tempting to chalk this up to parallel development, the coincidence is actually stranger than that. Enemy is based on a completely different novel from 2002, also titled The Double, written by José Saramago.
Both films explore what happens when two perfectly identical men occupy the same space, and the personal fallout that follows when one’s likeness is used by someone else with questionable intentions. While they tell very different stories, they make for an interesting double feature if you want to see how two doppelganger narratives released in the same year end up echoing each other in unexpected ways, as if they were each other’s doppelgangers all along.
Strangely enough, both films also exist within liminal, brutalist environments, trapping their protagonists in fluorescently-lighted spaces as their identities fracture and their personal lives collapse while they try to figure out where they belong in the world.
As of this writing, The Double is streaming for free on Tubi. Enemy, which explores similar themes and came out the same year, is currently streaming on Max.
Entertainment
The Most Disturbing CSI Episode Is Pure Nightmare Fuel
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For 15 years, CSI reigned on CBS as one of the highest-rated shows after perfecting the procedural formula. Every now and then, the series broke its formula, from “Lab Rats” focusing on the side characters to “4×10” telling a series of short stories, but none shattered viewer expectations quite like Season 11’s “Sqweegel.” The night-shift team was trying to figure out the motives and identity behind the gimp-suit-clad serial killer, leading to the most unexpected ending of the entire series: They failed.
The Bad Guy Wins
Every now and then, there’s an episode of CSI where the villain’s triumphant, going back to Season 1 that occur din “Chimera,” except the doctor with twisted DNA eventually was brought to justice in a later episode. Sqweegel, named after the noise a little girl heard in a carwash, is never arrested, his identity is never uncovered, and he’s never seen again. When the episode starts, viewers know something is off about what they are about to see by the way the killer moves through a posh, upscale Las Vegas home. Slipping in through a window is one thing, but the way he walks up the stairs in a strange, herky-jerky motion that’s also inhumanly smooth and fluid is immediately unsettling.
The team, led during this era by Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) and Dr. Raymond Langston (Laurence Fishburne), starts piecing together Sqweegel’s motive when they realize each victim was a hypocrite. The first was a disability-rights advocate who killed her son, but she admitted what she did and was allowed to live. Of the rest of the victims, a firefighter who starts fires to be a hero, and a cheating wife who serves on the Family Values Committee. As far as motives go, it’s par for the course for the procedural. It’s also the only part of the episode that’s normal.
The visual of Sqweegel stalking his victims and slipping into spaces too small and tight for a normal human is somehow more disturbing than the usual dead bodies. Sqweegel’s final shot, lacing up the gimp suit and saying, “I am no one,” is more dark and more haunting than you’d expect from a network show. After the episode first aired in 2010, CBS didn’t outright ban it; instead, the network quietly pulled it from the regular rotation, but it’s available today wherever CSI is streaming.
A Killer From A Different Series
“Sqweegel” felt like an episode from another series dropped into CSI. That’s essentially what it was. Series creator Anthony E. Zuiker wrote a series of novels alongside Duane Swierczynki called Level 26, which featured Sqweegel as the villain. The episode’s release date coincided with the release of Level 26: Dark Prophecy. Disturbingly, Sqweegel in the book was even darker and more disturbing than what was shown on network television.
The character was brought to life by Daniel Browning Smith, a talented contortionist, who also co-hosted Stan Lee’s Superhumans. Smith has hypermobile Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, which allows him a superhuman degree of flexibility. On the one hand, knowing that a real human was performing Sqweegel’s stunts and they weren’t special effects may make them worse, but on the other hand, Daniel Browning Smith also performs comedy and hasn’t killed anyone.
Corporate synergy is the real horror of CSI’s most disturbing episode. Because Sqweegel wasn’t created for the series, there was never going to be a resolution. Instead, he managed to kill, traumatize a child, and get away into the night, not because he was a criminal mastermind, but because of corporate licensing. Millions of fans were left wondering when he’d return, never realizing that they’d only learn his fate if they took a look, because it’s in a book.
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