[Review] 'Stopmotion' Blends Stop-Motion Effects and Live Action Into a Visceral Nightmare

​One of the earliest films I can remember watching—which would explain a lot about me—is Desmond Davis’ Clash of the Titans (1981). The legendary Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects wowed my little kid brain and opened it up to a world of possibilities. He brought those puppets to life using what I could only determine then was pure and simple magic. With his stunning feature directorial debut, Stopmotion, Robert Morgan recreates that magic…and then twists it into an unforgettable nightmare that would’ve had that same awestruck kid I was sobbing and begging for his mommy.
 
Ella (Aisling Franciosi) is a stop-motion artist working under the tyrannical thumb of her mother (Stella Gonet), a world-renowned stop-motion filmmaker. Arthritis ravaging her hands but desperate to finish her last film, Ella’s mother has her following her every command, ordering her to move the puppets this way and that. When mom has a stroke and Ella is freed from her grasp, she decides to make her own movie, realizing with horror that she may not have any ideas of her own. Until she meets a little girl (Caoilinn Springall) who offers inspiration that leads Ella down a dark and sinister path towards completing what will surely be her masterpiece…at any cost necessary.
 
In the realm of Censor and Berberian Sound Studio, Morgan and Robin King’s script leads viewers through a descent into complete and utter madness, centered within the film world and focused on someone who has begun to let the pressure of their work get the best of them. Portrayed with a quiet intensity that suggests something violent lurking just underneath the surface, Franciosi delivers a hypnotic performance that pulls you under with her as she sinks into a psychological nightmare from which there is no escape. Lola de la Mata’s skin-prickling score and an unsettling sound design that revels in the squishy sound of tearing flesh do wonders to rattle the nerves, yet what is perhaps most disturbing is just how relatable of a person Ella is. Her mother calls her puppet, leaving Ella to believe, “she’s the brains, and I’m the hands”. The young artist wants desperately to get out from under mom’s shadow and prove that she has her own talents, yet is faced with a crippling anxiety when it comes time to prove it. Her story is one countless artists have faced, that fear of finding nothing in the inspirational well, condensed here into ninety minutes of dread-induced terror.

Though the middle of the film can feel as if its dragging its feet a bit on the way to a conclusion any seasoned horror fan will likely see coming from a mile away, Morgan establishes himself as a true visionary with Stopmotion. Sequence after sequence had my eyes wide and my jaw agape as Ella’s reality clashes with that of the new stop-motion film she’s working on, about a girl chased through the woods by a terrible being dubbed “The Ash Man”. Artist and art collide, blending beautifully executed stop-motion with live action film and making a case for why more directors would do well to include the animation style in their works of horror. There’s an almost supernatural quality to the way the puppets move, one that becomes even more unnerving once Ella decides to make her puppets by placing mortician’s wax over raw meat. Yes, it’s disgusting, and the squelching sound of them reminds the audience just how grotesque they are all throughout. Like Franciosi, the puppets themselves have a hypnotic quality, magical and inspiring and horrific all at once. You could say Stopmotion is seduction by way of imagination, drawing us further and further into a mind that is the epitome of the “tortured artist”.
 
And that’s perhaps what is most affecting about Stopmotion. King and Morgan have crafted an intensely uncomfortable film with a moment or two of gruesome gore that had me curling up into my seat and wishing I could peel my eyes away, but what most resonated is how well the film captures the struggle of creation. Even Stephen King gets writer’s block. It happens to the best of us. The blank page, the blank canvas, hell, the blank film reel…the fear that you won’t be able to fill it with something worthwhile can be overwhelming. Stopmotion takes the saying of pouring blood, sweat and tears into your work and makes it literal. Ella wants so badly to be the artist she thinks she is, to be the puppeteer instead of the puppet, that she’ll do anything to find the inspiration she needs. That’s an uncomfortable and all too relatable journey to take with someone, leaving me confident that the film will have even hardened horror aficionados cringing once or twice.
 
The destination of what lies at the end of Stopmotion may not be all that surprising, undercutting moments that don’t hit quite as hard as a result, but this is a film that’s about the journey, and oh my, is it one that leaves you shaken. Between Franciosi’s hanging over the edge performance, Morgan’s ability to craft skin-crawling dread and effects that are the definition of nightmarish, Stopmotion is one that delights with its unrestrained imagination as much as it terrorizes. Here’s hoping it helps create a new wave of stop-motion horror which, if you ask me and that awestruck kid who grew up on Clash of the Titans, is long overdue.

Stopmotion arrives in theaters on February 23rd before making its way to Shudder on May 31st.

By Matt Konopka