Ash Riffs on Alien and Colonial Body Horror

Who is invading who?

Flying Lotus’ directorial debut doesn’t have the originality of his twisted, liquid psychedelic beats. But as an Alien derivative, Ash delivers the expected pleasures, especially in its Thing-like grotesque third act. Resurrecting the classics in blood and slime and viscera can also clarify some of the themes that might have gotten lost in the ichor—in this case, the reverse colonial terror sd you realize that the thing whose home you are planning to erase, invade, and inhabit may erase, invade, and inhabit you first.

The movie does hold back a lot of information, and while I’m not trying to give everything away, there will be spoilers.

The film takes a while to get up to speed, thanks to plot amnesia and some shaky acting by the leads—perhaps in part because of Flying Lotus’ uncertainty with direction? In any case, the plot stutters into gear as astronaut Riya Ortiz (Eiza González) awakes in a spaceship sans memory; she is soon joined by a colleague, Brion (Aaron Paul) who has traveled down from an orbital platform. With Biron’s help Riya slowly realizes that she’s on a mission to find a refuge for an environmentally collapsing Earth; her crew discovered a planet known as Ash with nearly breathable air. But she has flashbacks of her crewmate’s hideous deaths, maybe at her own hands. And she worries that the one survivor, Catherine (Kate Elliott) may be infected with…something.

Again, the Alien influence is thoroughgoing, though there are also nods to the last 50 odd years of zombie films, and to Carpenter’s The Thing. Crawling clusters of ick and tendrils slide into various orifices and turn friend to monster, self to other in suitably grotesque and violent fashion. Flying Lotus has a music video-like penchant for jump cuts as flashbacks, and semi-buried trauma keep breaking through the façade of the present, as the aliens wetly crawl out of faces and skulls.

A major difference from Ridley Scott’s vision is that the grotesque others get a brief but telling chance to speak for themselves. The infection tells Riya from inside her own skull that, “This is our planet, our investment. We will not let you take it from us.” The thing also, like Octavia Butler’s Oankali, declares humans “inefficient” and “doomed to self-destruction”—it assures her that her assimilation is a gift, and that she should feel honored.

This is a pretty straightforward representation of the rhetoric of colonialism. Invaders always tell indigenous people that their cultures are worthless and backwards and that their erasure and destruction is insignificant since they were essentially doomed anyway by the inevitable tide of history.

The dynamic is further underlined by the fact that the majority of Eiza’s crew aren’t white. In that context, you can see the film as a kind of extended meditation on colonial violence; memories are erased, the colonizer recruits some of the colonized to fight and kill each other; there is an assault on the victim’s sense of self and sense of history as well as on their actual lives and possessions.

At the same time, the alien’s explanation of themselves also echoes the history of colonial resistance. As the aliens say, they were there first (though the reference to “investment” suggests they might have come to the planet as capitalist invaders too.) It’s the humans who have exhausted their planet and have gone off into space to find another, and/or to take someone else’s. In that sense, the film functions as what scholar David Higgins’ calls a reverse colonial fantasy. As in War of the Worlds, the anxiety is that they will do unto us as we have done unto them. Should we be rooting for the humans here? If the aliens are a metaphor for indigenous people, whose side should we be on?

These issues do come up in Alien, but are somewhat submerged under the film’s theme of capitalist corporate exploitation—which overlaps with colonialism, but isn’t exactly synonymous with it. I wouldn’t say that Ash has a ton to add to or say about reverse colonial sf/horror—but it deploys the tropes gleefully in service of its paranoid parable about how we are the nightmare things that inhabit our own brains. Add in Flying Lotus’ soundtrack of semi-ambient squish and skitter and even if you won’t be surprised by most of the twists, it’s still satisfying to let the thing grab hold.