This horrific SF film amazed me: it is a shame that he was not released in the cinema in France but on Amazon

News culture This horrific SF film amazed me: it is a shame that he was not released in the cinema in France but on Amazon

Ash’s tragic fate

Today I would like to tell you about an SF film that has not made a lot of noise across the Atlantic as on the old continent, and that grieves me at the point as a cinephile. There is no question here of mentioning his qualities and faults as a cinematographic object, but his destiny upset by Hollywood studios. Ash directed by the artist Flying Lotus with Eiza Gonzalez (the 3 -bodies problem on Netflix) and Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) in the main roles did not go out in France at the cinemabut only on Amazon Prime Video.

It all started so well for ASH with a great first in March 2025 at the South by Southwest 2025 (or SXSW), a festival of music, cinema and interactive media, then an exploitation in theaters in stride. Unfortunately, the film collected only $ 1.1 million at the box office and was deprogrammed very quickly. The decision was then made to yield international rights to Amazon MGM Studios and therefore by extension to Prime Video who was not asked to add another exclusivity to his catalog.

ASH synopsis: “Riya, a researcher on a space station, discovers when she woke up that her colleagues were brutally murdered during an attack of which she has no memory. With the help of Brion, another researcher sent to rescue her, she tries to discover what happened, triggering a series of terrifying events.” – (Amazon Prime Video)

ASH casting: Eaiza González (Briion Cargyle) Ikk.

Try Amazon Prime for free for 30 days

A cinema experience on Amazon

I was not hoping for much Ash, except to have a “good” moment in front of a horrifying science fiction film openly inspired by Alien, the eighth passenger (1979). I fully understand the reproaches made to the film by the criticism which still awarded him the note of 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. For my part, I am mixed. I appreciated the starting premise, the casting and the external visuals. As for the script and the staging … This is another story. Everything is, so to speak, sewn with white and expected wire.

Ash is inspired by Ridley Scott’s film, but that’s not all. He draws on science fiction by sometimes “quoting” Event horizon the vessel of the beyond Paul Ws Anderson (1997) or even The Thing by John Carpenter (1982), but never thinking about badly. I especially found this sense of the strange proper to the comic strip of SF of which Metal Hurlant was the spearhead. And it was these “poetic” moments that have seduced me. The Flying Lotus film amazed me, disturbed, also disappointed, but I must recognize a quality. He tries and it’s a refreshing feeling in the era of franchises and blockbusters that saturate the market.

Ash is not perfect. It is even steeped in defects, but that does not matter because the subject is elsewhere (just like the truth). By being deprived of an exploitation in theaters, the film could not express its full potential. It is difficult to appreciate at its fair value an artistic work on a television as large as it is while it has been designed to be projected in a dark room. Ash did not have the fate he deserved and us with it.