Perfect New, R-Rated Sci-Fi Thriller Is A Deep-Space Psychological Slaughter 

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 second ago

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.