Who can’t wait to live on other planets? Second thoughts may be in order after seeing the woolly sci-fi-horror trip “Ash” from Grammy-winning L.A. music guru-turned-director Flying Lotus (a.k.a. Steven Ellison), who spins a bare-bones game of cosmic survival with true sound-and-image flair and an unbridled enthusiasm for the strange beauty of mutant gore.

That this modestly budgeted freak-out was assembled by a fusion artist, someone expert at scoring your daydreams and nightlife, is never in doubt. In fact, as we become oriented to the movie’s space station on the titular planet, where crew member Riya (Eiza González) awakens bloodied and confused by the grim reality that her colleagues have been brutally murdered, the sputtering fluorescent hues, jarring memory flashes and woozy electronic tones that accompany her tour of the premises suggest the remnants of a bad rave night as much as they do an interstellar mission gone terribly wrong.

Early on in Jonni Remmler’s screenplay, there’s a brief flashback to the outpost’s five-person team hanging out, teasing each other about what their Neil Armstrong-like statement is going to be and hinting at their exploratory aims for humankind. (Surprise, surprise: Earth’s becoming uninhabitable.) The men — stoic Capt. Adhi (Iko Uwais) and good-natured Kevin (Beulah Koale) and Davis (Ellison) — seem to take their task seriously, while hard-edged Clarke (Kate Elliott) appears to be the wisecracker and Riya appears simultaneously no-nonsense and cynical.

That’s it for movie chitchat, however. The director, in sync with his cinematographer, Richard Bluck, would much rather spend his energies pulling you through a moodily lighted, otherworldly gauntlet of aftermath menace, kaleidoscopic starscapes and flashbacks that hint at a suddenly amnesiac Riya’s role in the slaughter, than let you get too caught up in portrayal details or plot mechanics.

Still, the mystery of what went down increasingly animates Riya (and us), especially after a guy named Brion (Aaron Paul, reliably grave) suddenly shows up, having answered the distress call sent to his orbiting spacecraft. He wants to convince her to pay more attention to worsening oxygen levels and to salvage the mission by getting the hell out. But as her memories start to return, more is revealed about the real threat, which turns out to be very much the kind of penetrative threat an in-his-prime John Carpenter would have mightily enjoyed turning into the stuff of our crunchy, squishy nightmares.

The legacy of “Alien” is there, of course, in the Ripley parallels, but Carpenter nods are too — especially “The Thing” and a “Halloween”-like emergence from an out-of-focus background. (It may be why the terror titan warranted a place in the end-credits thank-yous.) The thrumming score too is decidedly influenced by the pulsating synth themes of Carpenter, with some of Angelo Badalamenti’s melodic melancholia thrown in for good measure. But the soundtrack is also its own evocative work of intoxicating techno-brood, one that could be piped from your car speakers to readily turn any routine neighborhood errand into a suddenly ominous excursion. (Just as playing parts of Bernard Herrmann’s “Vertigo” score instantly gives you the feeling you’re tailing the car ahead of you.)

“Ash” is categorically a vibe more than it is an especially unique story or illuminating character study, even if González’s steely beauty conveys plenty about the psychological stakes at hand. But in this age of expensive and overwrought world-building, it’s Ellison’s experiential care with well-worn material that delivers the goods. There’s also something resonant in an Afrofuturist take on colonialist sci-fi, one that marks its narrative space with such a potent mix of planetary wonder, identity peril and alien violence. It’s refreshing to be reminded by movies like this that we should always be asking: Who’s doing the invading, again?

“Novocaine” stars Jack Quaid as Nathan Caine, a man with a condition that makes him unable to feel pain. This is an action movie, and it sounds like a man who can’t feel pain would fit right into the role of action hero, right? Actually, no. Caine’s condition is just terribly inconvenient in his everyday life. He could get cut or burned without realizing it, and if the wound is left untreated, he could get an infection. He doesn’t have the instinct to keep his tongue away from his teeth, so he has to abstain from solid foods or else he could chomp right into his tongue. He can’t even feel the pangs associated with having to go to the bathroom, so he just goes every three hours whether he needs to or not.

Caine’s condition has led to social awkwardness, and although he’s nice to people, he has few real friends outside of unseen online gamer Roscoe (Jacob Batalon). But things change when he starts a relationship with fellow bank employee Sherry (Amber Midthunder), who has her own history with physical pain. They go on one date and Caine immediately knows he’s in love with her. He’s at a rare high point in his life at work the next day when a trio of robbers massacre that bank and take Sherry hostage as they flee. The sense of fear and potential loss is the worst feeling Caine has ever had in his life, and he’s going to rescue Sherry no matter what happens to his body in the process.

This means getting into a series of fights with the robbers (Evan Hengst, Conrad Kemp, and Ray Nicholson). He’s nowhere near as tough or skilled as they are, but he can use his condition to his advantage. He can get hit, but he can get back up. He can stall for time by taking a beating or enduring torture until help arrives. He can even use weapons that his enemies are too afraid to touch because they’re scalding hot or submerged in a deep fryer. By the way, is it weird that this movie makes me unusually inclined toward cannibalism with a scene where Caine makes his hand extra-crispy?

This movie can thank its lucky stars for Jack Quaid, whose sincerity and commitment to the character are the only interesting things about the movie. I was really looking forward to seeing Amber Midthunder again after she carried the “Predator” prequel “Prey” in 2022, but she’s disappointing in a predictable role here. Batalon is just playing a less interesting version of his “Spider-Man” sidekick character. Betty Gabriel has some heartfelt moments as a cop, but her character doesn’t have much impact on the story. Perhaps most disappointing is Ray Nicholson as the lead villain. He was so expressive and unnerving last year in “Smile 2,” but I didn’t get any of that from his bland performance here. I’d have let Conrad Kemp carry the load as primary antagonist, he has some scene-stealing qualities about his face.

Caine’s convoluted rescue mission reminded me of the convoluted plot of “Love Hurts” from last month, a movie that I decried while praising Quaid’s performance in “Companion” in the same article. Perhaps it’s appropriate that my opinion of “Novocaine” falls squarely between those two films. This movie could have been a lot more brainless, but I quibble with its predictable story (I guessed one twist just from the trailers), lame characters outside of the lead, and tonal inconsistency. The advertising makes this movie look a lot more comedic than it is. There are gags, to be sure, but there are also long stretches where the movie plays things unexpectedly straight. Not that actors like Quaid and Gabriel aren’t good at playing things straight, but there were times when I noticed I hadn’t laughed for what seemed like several minutes. Like many of the punches Caine takes, this movie wasn’t exactly “painful,” but it certainly didn’t do me much good.

Grade: C

“Novocaine” is rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, and language throughout. Its running time is 110 minutes.

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

A popular if snarky response to the horrible behavior of someone else’s kids goes a little like this: You need a license to own a pet, but they’ll let anybody have a child.

Bring on the cinema of conjecture. Taking that “what if” premise of state-mandated parental suitability to a dystopian extreme is the elegantly oddball if undercooked “The Assessment,” starring Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel as a seemingly perfect couple in a decidedly imperfect future, who find their dream of parenthood a possible reality if they can survive a week of testing. Doing the observing in their ultra-modern seaside home is a severe-looking woman named Virginia (a powerhouse Alicia Vikander), whose unorthodox method of evaluation brings the well-intentioned Mia (Olsen) and Aaryan (Patel) to the brink of personality disintegration.

Isn’t rehearsing a good idea? Perhaps not in the artificial, sterile and bureaucratically ordered world created by screenwriters Dave Thomas and Nell Garfath-Cox (credited as Mrs. & Mr. Thomas) and John Connelly, and given palpable gravity by Fleur Fortuné, directing her first feature after establishing a name in music videos. And as with a lot of filmmakers transitioning to long-form narrative after success with bite-sized flash, “The Assessment” is a commanding mood piece until our thirst for deeper emotional and thematic resonance reveals its shortcomings.

A little mouth to feed is a privilege when there’s little left to feed on, even if groundbreaking pharmaceuticals have allowed a wealthy (and compliant) few to survive on a climate-ravaged, resource-scarce and population-regulated planet. Scientists Mia and Aaryan aren’t sitting idly in their coastally remote but achingly tasteful pocket of this world: She’s trying to solve sustainable food problems in a dense greenhouse and he’s got a cavernously dark, future-tech lab space wherein he’s creating virtual pets (gotta get the feel of the fur right) to offset that enforced mass culling of animals years ago. Responsible citizens who play by the rules should get to be parents, no?

Their mysterious assessor, however, who play-acts stages of childhood without a hint of where the borders lie, seems intent on disrupting their cautious hope. Vikander, perhaps recognizing how tantalizingly different this type of role is for her, turns Virginia into an unsettling tour de force of disciplined abandon. The days offer up challenges — handling a tantrum, building a playhouse, hosting a dinner (Minnie Driver excels playing an especially caustic guest) — that push the couple’s buttons and force deeper questions about not only their union but who they are inside and how they feel about what’s being asked of them.

The deadpan humor and psychological peril of it all is handled with prickly finesse for a good while, even as the darkness begins to set in on their desires and dreams. Olsen in particular registers the cracks in the veneer of a smart, good yet questioning soul with aplomb. But when the movie reaches an admirable capacity with its ideas about parenthood, authoritarianism, mortality and connection, it falters in bringing everything to the reverberating conclusion its discomfiting first two-thirds merits.

Considering how efficiently the movie sets up its rules, the filmmakers opt to shatter one of its central, compelling enigmas by attempting to explain it in a poorly written scene toward the end. The attempt at a heart-tugging twist feels divorced from the nervy balance of tones that Fortuné had achieved, helped in no small part by the cool yet layered cinematography of Magnus Jonck, Jan Houllevigue’s production design and, of course, the delicious inscrutability in Vikander’s playdate menace. She’d give Dr. Benjamin Spock nightmares.