By Sara Clements | Film | February 23, 2024 |
By Sara Clements | Film | February 23, 2024 |
Have you ever been so focused on a project that you found yourself contemplating your life choices because it’s been eight hours, and you haven’t showered or even eaten? Well, Stopmotion is a movie all about that but cranked up ten notches. Any artist can be consumed by their work, and in Robert Morgan’s captivatingly deranged feature debut, it drives the artist into madness. Blending both live-action and stop-motion animation, Morgan’s horror film sees an animator bring life to her puppets. With flesh and blood, this art takes on a life of its own - literally. It’s been a while since a horror film genuinely succeeded at making me squirm; to look away in fright. It will be hard for any other horror film this year to beat this nightmare.
A cacophony of foul sounds and facial distortion foreshadow insanity from creation. The work of stop motion is so painstaking that it’s understandable if it drives a person insane. As the daughter of a legend in the field, animation is all Ella (Aisling Franciosi) knows. However, she has never been comfortable taking this work on herself. She has ideas but is unable to express them to a mother who seems like a heavy weight on Ella’s shoulders. The mother-daughter pair dress in medical garb as though about to perform surgery. Each movement of the puppets has the same precision needed for an incision. Suffering from arthritis, her mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), can’t work like she used to. So, Ella has to be her mother’s hands to finish her swan song. We arrive to this relationship at its end. When the bitterness has reached a boiling point for Ella and where each frame of this film feels like Suzanne desperately clinging to life. “Don’t you dare move,” Suzanne says threatfully as Ella places her hands on her mother’s puppets. You wonder what would happen if she did.
Unfortunately, this dynamic is quickly ended as Suzanne suffers a stroke and remains bedridden. As a result of this, Ella becomes determined to finish her mother’s film. With her boyfriend, Tom (Tom York)’s, help, Ella finds an apartment, acting as a creative space to work. At one point, Tom questions why she doesn’t make her own film. Why she doesn’t find her own voice. “I don’t have my own voice,” she says. But she soon finds it thanks to the appearance of a morbid, unnamed little girl (Caoilinn Springall). The girl, acting as the manifestation of Ella’s suppressed imagination, awakens a creative fervor. Her mother called her “puppet”. Now, she’s pulling her strings, but they risk getting tangled as her new story manifests like a nightmarish dream.
Stop motion has always been pretty creepy, and it has played into that by creating some of the best horror films of all time. Coraline, for example, is still ranked as one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen. The button eyes and the mother’s spider transformation still linger in my mind. So, it’s genius that Stopmotion blends both live action and stop motion together, with the puppets becoming life-like as Ella’s story begins to blend with reality. We speak of how art is alive in everything we do and experience, but this is nightmare fuel. The film makes your skin crawl and that has a lot to do with character designs and the script. Using clay to build her puppets isn’t enough. As Ella’s newfound imagination runs on steroids spiked with hallucinogenic poison, her story of a girl running away from a creepy, supernatural character named the Ashman changes with her technique. Her puppets’ armature skeletons slowly become built from everything from raw meat to dead animals. Real flesh and bone. A redness forms underneath the white clay, like blood under the skin.
In television’s The Fall or in the 2018 film The Nightingale, Franciosi has always impressed in works that have often challenged the viewer’s tolerance when it comes to watching violence. Here, it’s the body horror that tests you. The project pulls Ella apart, piece by piece as she becomes consumed by her work. It’s often unsettling and terrifying to watch her go into a seemingly unbreakable psychosis. It’s also quite a physical film that sees Franciosi as Ella going to violent lengths to make her movie. But even the concentration and precision required to make stop motion takes physical composure. The actress often has to crack her fingers and clasp her hands together in order to build herself up to make every minor adjustment to her creations. This process takes a lot out of Ella, as we see Franciosi’s performance convey someone excited over her work to someone who looks half dead with exhaustion.
Stopmotion is transfixing even in its more trippy and weird moments. The audience is never at ease with this film. You’re constantly seeking comfort - an end. Not, in a bad way, but it’s an unsettling display of the power of storytelling and how mediums like film can manifest themselves into our real lives. But more than anything else, Stopmotion questions how much we would be willing to give of ourselves for art.
Stopmotion is in theaters now. Everywhere you rent movies March 15. Stream it on Shudder May 31.