Movie Review: ‘Stopmotion’

Director: Robert Morgan

Cast: Aisling Franciosi, Stella Gonet, Tom York, Caoilinn Springall

Plot: A stop motion animator begins adapting a tale told by a neighbourhood kid into a haunting short film. Reality begins to distort as her life is tainted by the mysterious Ashman of her film.

Review: About 20 years ago there was this real messy remake of the Haunting of Hill House story with…stuff that happened. If there’s one bright spot amid the swamp of ideas, it’s then use of stop motion film techniques in giving the ghosts an unsettling, unnatural movement. Now we have a film that using stop motion characters coming to life and entering the world of their animator. Or it’s in her mind.

Ella (Franciosi) is an animator following in the footsteps of her mother, a legend in the animation world. The younger creative worries that she can’t come up with her own idea, an idea literally illustrated by her ageing mother giving Ella strict instructions on how to move her characters, problems with her own hands preventing her from working the set herself. As her mother’s health takes a bad turn, she’s left with the task to finish the project. Quickly giving up on living up to the reputation, Ella and her musician boyfriend set up a new studio space in a mostly abandoned apartment block.

This fresh start isn’t enough to spark her imagination, leaving Ella frustrated with her boyfriend who works a ‘real job’ to support his art and his sister who works for commercial studio that wants to recruit her. Ella maintains that her art must come first and dedicates herself to it full time, taking inspiration from a young girl living in the block her forces her way into Ella’s process. Now telling the story of an ‘Ashman’ chasing a young girl, Ella is inspired to use raw meat and animal carcasses in her models. As the creative process takes over her life and she becomes reliant on the young girl’s imagination, Ella spirals into hallucinations.

As Ella clashes with those close to her and withdraws further into her project, she begins to see what could be considered a textbook example of movie madness. Her creations come to life, she sees things that aren’t there, she’s paranoid, and she starts to question of is real. The presence of the stop motion figures, dripping old meat and decayed animals, is freaky enough but the inclusion of sudden body horror puts it over the edge. Sudden moments of Ella’s flesh giving away under her touch like it’s made of wax. A particularly intense scene towards the end involves Ella pulling apart a stitched wound, and it’s downright difficult to watch.

The strongest, and most unique, scenes of horror involve the stop motion puppetry itself. Ella’s project, telling the story pieced out the obnoxious neighbour child, has all the hallmarks of a modern Creepypasta character with an Evil Dead setting. Creepy enough, and including the dolls moving around her apartment is disconcerting. Unfortunately, these scenes feature something of a shortcut effect that breaks the realism of this nightmare world. In a few shots, the ‘Ashman’ puppet is a man in a suit and their movements do not match the shot motion jerkiness of the animated sequences. It’s jarring, and distracting at a point when the movie should be at peak tension.

This is a very good, very upsetting monster and body horror. With a bit more fine-tuning it could have made a bigger splash.

Rating: SEVEN out of TEN