Stopmotion Review- Creepy And Arresting Descent

The celebrated filmmaker known for his short films, Richard Morgan’s debut feature film Stopmotion, is an agonizing bit of nightmare fuel. Finally, getting a full-length film from Morgan was worth the wait. Like his surreal freakout film, our patience is rewarded with vicious imagery, child-like creepiness not seen since Damien McCarthy’s Caveat, and a last-act bit of Cronenberg body horror. Don’t be fooled by the idea of a partially stop-motion animated horror movie. This isn’t an innocent bit of nostalgia to soothe our inner child. This is what happens when obsession becomes art and consumes the artist.

Stop-motion animation can be beautiful, whimsical, and emotionally evocative. The underappreciated Wendell and Wild is a good example. Morgan uses that expectation and twists it. In a similar way to Mad God’s hellscape, Stopmotion is a slow-motion descent into hell. In this case, it is a hell created by a young artist’s mind that becomes locked in a ferocious game with itself.

Unique and arresting, Stopmotion is unlike anything you have ever seen. Art imitates and destroys life in Morgan’s grisly arthouse film. Ella is a young artist who spends her days acting as her mother’s assistant. Her mother is a famed stop-motion artist who can no longer use her hands, so Ella(Aisling Franciosi) works as a caregiver, subordinate, and verbal punching bag to her mother, who is trying to complete one last film before she dies. When her mother has a stroke, Ella is free to finish her mother’s work or pursue her own movie. She chooses the latter, moves into a new workspace, and meets a strange little girl(Caoilinn Springall) who claims to be a neighbor. Their collaborative relationship turns dark when Ella’s young muse suggests more and more, let’s say, unconventional materials for their creations. Hers is a dark fable that pushes Ella’s boundaries and slowly erodes her mind.

Ella was already under stress when we first meet her. Her overbearing mother barks unrealistic orders and instills self-doubt at every turn. She needs Ella to finish her film, yet she can’t relinquish control. An unbearable relationship sets the groundwork for what is to come. Stopmotion never entirely confirms whether Ella’s behavior is a product of something sinister or a deep-seated insecurity she can’t make art by herself. That ambiguity serves the movie well. Some mysteries are best left unsolved.

Aisling Franciosi plays Ella with the same brutal intensity she brought to Nightingale. She is a brittle powerhouse of tortured thoughts and dangerous drivers. Ella is desperately trying to outrun something. By night, it is a gruesome doll of her own creation; by day, it is her self-doubt. Franciosi is mesmerizing and doesn’t let us lose sympathy for Ella until it is too late. She dances between madness and meakness as effortlessly as Sissy Spacek’s Carrie. Her emotional range doesn’t let the bizarre creations overtake her performance. This is a story about a woman’s slide into insanity, not a mythical mortician’s wax monster, and she never lets us forget that.

Instead of finding freedom, Ella finds a prison of her own making. Obviously, Ella is trying to work through something horrific, but she can’t articulate it in any meaningful way, and thus, the Ash Man, a literal flesh-and-bone meat puppet, haunts her days and nights. Morgan and his co-writer, Robin King, don’t take the expected route in dealing with trauma. Ella is a roiling mass of trauma, but it only manifests itself once her mother is no longer there to control her. The implication is that something terrible happened to Ella, and she has never been able to work through it.

Secondary characters like Ella’s boyfriend and his opportunistic sister are all surface. Both are hazy representations of pieces in Ella’s life. Neither is fleshed out(pun intended), which is probably intentional because everything that happens in Stopmotion is from Ella’s perspective. It is her mind that we ride down into delirium, and it is from her mind that her movie’s abominations spring. Shortly after beginning her own project, Ella’s life blurs with that of her movie. With each new scene filmed, her life unravels further. Those who orbit her life act only as placeholders, tools, and materials for her work.

The entire film has a warped fairy tale quality, regardless of the grotesque meat puppets Ella creates. The sights and sounds look and sound weirder than you can imagine. The soundtrack is a compelling mix of crunchy, slurping, wet mechanics that wear down the viewer until they sit perched, holding their breath, waiting for the inevitable arrival of the Ash Man. Ella’s young charge builds the lore of Ash Man in real-time from seemingly thin air, making you question what else we don’t know about Ella’s childhood.

Stopmotion is uncanny and disquieting. Delicate in its approach, it demands attention without asking. There are some genuinely disturbing moments, particularly with Ella’s creative use of dead animals, and later, something even worse that is memorable. Equally as effective are the focused beats of Ella’s paralyzing fear that hammer home the idea of past trauma. It’s fitting then that the final chilling shot is an agonizingly beautiful look at her calm face. We might wonder if Ella’s art swallowed her whole, but we never doubt Franciosi’s control.

Stopmotion is in theaters on February 23rd, 2024, and will stream exclusively on Shudder on May 31st, s024.