Ash: Middling Fact-Based Drama Set Amid Wildfire Seeks Compassion, Earns Fatigue

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C+

Andrew Huculiak’s sophomore feature Ash is a drama about Stan (Tim Guinee), a journalist with a secret which is somewhat worse than the secrets journalists usually trade in.

We first meet Stan as he’s covering the 2016 Okanagan fires, shot by the film crew while in progress. Stan stays out all night, out of the safe zone, interacting with the first responders, promising his goal is public service, rather tabloid sensationalism, and worried about a van that seems to be following him.

He is, apparently, in recovery from alcoholism and a minor leaguer in his profession. When he has a chance to report by phone to a TV station, he’s excited by his shot at the big time. But a combination of anxiety and technical problems means he fumbles the opportunity, and he’s devastated.

Where are we going with this? Given Stan’s job as a journalist, and his desire for a big break, the reasonable assumption is that Stan is about to fulfil the cliché of the desperate reporter who commits a crime to get a scoop.

The theme was played out in the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal movie, Nightcrawler. Sure enough, police arrive at Stan’s home one morning. All spoilers from here on, starting with this: The warrant is for possession of child porn.

In a Georgia Strait interview during the Vancouver International Film Festival last September, Huculiak said he was advised “at every turn” against making Ash, a film the director describes as ”exploring the edges of empathy.”

To be sure, the film makes sure to show us that Stan feels badly about this. The Okanagan fires (impressively shot) rage as a correlative to his incendiary emotional state. Stan goes into the woods and puts a knife blade on his wrist but can’t bring himself to cut. He rubs his face with ashes, like a traditional penitent, and goes to bed like that. His deceived wife, Gail (Chelah Horsdal) is repelled and horrified but wants to stick by him.

In another narrative zigzag, it turns out the “child porn” that is found on Stan’s electronic devices aren’t images but transcripts of chat room discussions. What’s more, a psychiatrist concludes that Stan isn’t a pedophile. Instead, he suffers from pedophile-themed obsessive-compulsive disorder (POCD) which involve intrusive thoughts that he might be a pedophile, which led him to those incriminating online chats.

This condition, it turns out, is not just some moral or legal dodge. The script is based on the case of David Preston, a former British Columbia reporter under similar circumstances, who was busted in 2013 on similar charges, which were dropped when he agreed to several conditions, including medication and therapy. He wrote a book about his experience and his condition.

But why is Stan a journalist in the drama? To some degree, it’s an unintentional red herring. True, Stan has public recognition which exacerbates his subsequent shaming, but the film does little to explore the irony of a journalist who becomes a news story.

Shot against the backdrop of those ferocious B.C. fires, Ash is both awkward and ambitious. The core of the film is a handful of scenes of Stan’s shame and the difficult negotiations of his angry intimacy with his wife and public shunning.

Both Guinee as the sheepishly personable Stan and Horsdal as his maternal wife are strong (the secondary cast less so) as the emotions are dialed to maximum. Smoke billows and the music swells with ecclesiastical fervor. Periodically, we hear voiceover of Stan’s journals, ruminations on the passing of time and loss, like those of a Robert Bresson narrator.

Great fire footage aside though, all this feels like over-reaching, an anecdote of guilt and punishment that strives to be inflated into an epic spiritual struggle. Stan’s mental health problems deserve compassion but not an outpouring of it. There’s just too much demand for it going around these days.

Ash. Directed by Andrew Huculiak. Written by Andrew Huculiak, Josh Huculiak, Cayne McKenzie and Joseph Schweers. Starring Tim Guinee, Chelah Horsdal, Eric Keenleyside and Cameron Crosby. Now available on iTunes.