Warning: Major spoilers ahead for Ash (2025)Ash, the feature directorial debut of rapper/producer Flying Lotus, begins as a slow-burning thriller before several key twists ratchet up the deep space horror​ and violence. Starring Eiza González as Riya, the video game-inspired Ash begins with a mystery, as a woman wakes up beaten and bleeding in a space station devoid of life with no memory of herself or her circumstances. She encounters the rest of the station’s crew ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in pools of blood as she explores. As she attempts to piece together what happened, she encounters Brion (Aaron Paul), who claims to be another member of her team.

As Riya and Brion begin to gather information, her memories come back in flashes of horrifying imagery. Her distrust of Brion grows as the dread builds, until she finally remembers that she was in fact the person behind the gruesome deaths of her colleagues. Confronted with a ticking clock until the breached space station runs out of oxygen, she and Brion clash over priorities as her memories continue to return. Thanks to video footage that she uncovers, Riya realizes that the crew encountered an alien life form while on a mission on the planet, which is colloquially named Ash.

Riya’s memories continue to flood back, and she eventually gets a clearer picture of what happened: her teammates all attacked her under control of something else, forcing her hand to kill them in self-defense. That leads to a final confrontation with Brion, who had been attempting to misguide her and suppress her returning memory. Once Brion’s true nature is revealed, Ash, which is now playing in theaters, kicks into high gear as Riya engages in a vicious fight for survival against the lethal enemy behind her memory loss and the death of everyone around her.

Riya’s Manipulated Memories & What Scenes Actually Happened In Ash

Her Actions And Memories Were Manipulated By The Alien Parasite

Throughout the movie, there are background warnings from the space station about abnorma activity or unusual life forms, which is at one point revealed to be Brion. However, Brion was always nothing more than a manifestation of the alien parasite within Riya’s own head. The extremely intelligent organism was the original inhabitant of the planet that Riya and her crew were testing as a viable living environment for humanity, and it used its parasitic nature to lodge itself in Riya’s skull and manipulate what she was seeing, specifically her interactions with Brion.

The medical patches that she continued to put on herself acted as a stabilizing agent for her body, which, while infested with the parasite, meant that she wouldn’t remember what had actually happened. Brion’s desire to get off the planet, to keep Riya using the patches, and every other suggestion or action he made was actually the parasite tricking Riya into doing what it wanted her to do, which was ultimately to survive and get off the planet, taking the parasite with her.

Flying Lotus’ unending array of quick cuts and terrifying images makes it difficult to actually determine what happened for real, and on what timeline. All the scenes from before Riya was knocked unconscious, including the brutal deaths of her teammates, actually happened. The scene in which she accidentally kills Clarke (thinking she was infested by the parasite) also really happened, but all the interactions with what she thought was her fellow survivor Brion were not real. The real Brion was killed before she woke up, and every interaction with him after that was manifested by the parasite.

How Long Was Riya Infected By The Parasite In Ash?

The Alien Creature Remained Hidden For Most Of The Movie

The parasite seems almost like a liquid metallic insect, clearly organic, but with a structure that flows and shape-shifts on a cellular level. The influence of movies like Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Daniel Espinosa’s Life is present in its design, and its general functionality is very reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It uses its shifting form to fit itself into other organisms, in this case humans, and by controlling their brain it controls their entire body.

The parasite’s ultimate goal was explained clearly to both Riya and the audience in a haunting sequence that was translated on the screen from its language. The parasite is part of a larger “existence”, a singular hive mind that was responsible for the life-sustaining machinery already present on Ash when Riya and her team arrived there. It was not about to let humanity overrun the planet, especially given humanity’s biological inefficiency and self-destructive nature. It needed Riya to make it back to the rest of humanity so that it might infect the species further, and ultimately eliminate or ᴀssimilate it.

To achieve that goal, the parasite jumped from one team member to another as its host bodies were killed. That led to only one survivor that it had access to in Riya, who had the parasite crawl into her brain through the gash over her eye that resulted from her fighting her teammates. It remained there until Riya removed it with the medical machine, meaning it was present in her head for at least two days, counting the time Riya was unconscious (the real Brion’s time of death was 51 hours before Riya examined it).

How Riya Killed The Parasite

Riya Fought It In Its Most Terrifying Form

Once Riya realized that the parasite had latched itself onto her brain, she resolved to excise it like any other unwelcome foreign body: with surgery. She subjected herself to the medical diagnosis/treatment machine (which only spoke Japanese and delivered news in a childish manner), which located and extracted the parasite from her brain as if it was a tumor. Unfortunately, it soon found another host: the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ body of the real Brion. It not only reanimated his corpse, but burst out of it in the form of a fleshy, toothy, tentacular hellbeast, clearly inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing.

After a chase through the space station, Riya finally managed to subdue the creature using the handheld flamethrower that she had used to defend herself before. She set the creature on fire, and as the flesh melted and burned away, it seemed as though she had actually killed it for good. However, as evidenced by the state of the orbiting station in the movie’s mid-credits scene, that may not have been the case.

Who Actually Killed Brion And The Crew

Riya Inadvertently Had A Ton Of Blood On Her Hands

While the deaths of the crew members were shown in blood-soaked, schizophrenic flashes as Riya’s memories came back to her, the audience finally got a clear picture at the end of the movie prior to Riya’s final showdown with the parasite. Once the parasite made its way into the space station after the crew’s expedition to the machinery on the planet’s surface, it took them over one at a time, enhancing their strength and turning each vessel against its counterparts, with the ultimate goal of killing all but one.

Riya was the one who actually killed Adhi (Iko Uwais) and Kevin (Beulah Koale), stabbing them both repeatedly once it was clear that they were not in control, and it was kill-or-be-killed. Davis (played by director Flying Lotus) had his skull destroyed when a rock thrown into the alien-built pit they discovered was ejected at extreme velocity. Clarke (Kate Elliott), who Riya believed to be the killer for a while, actually survived the original melee and was sent out of the base. When she returned, a paranoid and manipulated Riya drowned her by flooding her helmet with shower water.

The original Brion was bludgeoned to death by Kevin, under the influence of the parasite. One of the key moments in Riya’s realization came when she had the medical machine perform a post-mortem on his body, and discovered he had been ᴅᴇᴀᴅ for more than 2 days. That was the key indicator that the Brion she had been speaking to was not the real Brion.

How Ash Sets Up A Sequel

The Mid-Credits Scene Provides Some Uncertainty

The final image that the audience is left with for Ash is a sH๏τ of the orbiting space station, which was the destination for Riya and Brion that would allow them to not only survive, but possibly get back home. While Riya had supposedly killed the parasite with the handheld flamethrower as it used Brion’s body as a vessel, it (or potentially another of its species) stowed away on Riya’s ship to the orbiting station. The organic goo-soaked tentacles of the creature were wrapped around the entire thing, just as it had entrenched itself in the Ash station’s mainframe.

In theory, the parasite did in fact carry out its mission, and therefore a sequel could cover what happens next. Riya made it back to the orbiting station in one piece, and under the influence of the parasite could pilot her way back home, or summon help to retrieve her from Ash. However, it seems unlikely that a sequel ever occurs, as the box office return likely won’t justify a second chapter in a story that was self-contained and wrapped up nicely, even if a door was left open for more.

The Real Meaning Of Ash’s Ending

Ash Leans Into Space Horror Tropes But Through A Fresh Lens

Ash isn’t deep in the sense that there is a ton of meaning to be derived from its narrative. In every sense of the word, Ash is a work of art; its combination of feverish psychedelic scenery and Flying Lotus’ pulse-pounding score sums up to an incredible experience. However, as a result, it doesn’t spend a ton of time on crafting elaborate metaphors or mining new concepts on the human condition. There are plenty of homages to and influences of past sci-fi classics, and it sticks pretty close to the messages of those movies.

Ash deals with the fragility of humanity in the face of what else might be out there. It warns against the self-destructive tendencies of our species (quite directly), yet doesn’t shy away from the notion that our survival instinct keeps us formidable, even in the face of something stronger, smarter, and faster. It’s a fairly straightforward interpretation of the “humans in space find a ᴅᴇᴀᴅly alien” trope, but Flying Lotus’ unique and fully realized vision is what sets Ash apart from so many other, similar movies.