Movie Review: Stopmotion

Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi) is assisting her domineering, arthritic mother Suzanne (Stella Gonet) to complete her final film. Suzanne is a renowned stop motion animator and Ella has followed in her footsteps but is struggling to come up with ideas of her own, instead feeling more and more like she is just a pair of hands for her mother to use. When Suzanne suffers a stroke and is hospitalized, Ella feels compelled to try and finish the movie. Her boyfriend Tom (Tom York) invites her to stay with him and sets her up with a studio apartment in a supposedly empty building so she can continue her work there, an arrangement that doesn’t make much sense considering she already had ample space to work at her mother’s home, but whatever.

Ella quickly encounters a young girl (Caoilinn Springall) who also seems to mysteriously occupy a space in the same building and inserts herself into Ella’s life. Looking at the puppets and set that Ella is working with, she declares them boring and convinces her to start over with a different, creepier story. Ella initially disagrees but awakens the next morning to discover that she has done as the girl asked. Still, the girl isn’t fully pleased with the result and begins making increasingly troubling demands for the film. The villain the pair create, known as the Ash Man, begins to appear in the real world and Ella starts to fear for her sanity and safety.

Stopmotion uses surreal imagery and sounds to keep the viewer feeling every bit as disoriented and helpless as Ella. The stop motion sequences are fantastically rendered and the character designs undeniably creepy, especially as they bleed more and more into Ella’s reality. Franciosi is excellent as the lead, believably portraying her conflicted emotions as she descends into madness, while Springall is effectively eerie as her strange neighbor.

Director Robert Morgan deploys color and off-kilter set design in a manner reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, which further confuses the line between what (if anything) is real and what isn’t and helps to ratchet up the tension as the story progresses. Awash with visions straight out of nightmares, this is firmly one of the most frightening films of the year and it caps things off with a disturbing finale that will haunt viewers as they try to settle in for bed. ★★★★★