Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews

by
Matthew M. Bartlett

Stopmotion

Director – Robert Morgan

Writers – Robin King and Robert Morgan

I should like Stopmotion. I should love it. It should be my favorite movie of the year. It contains some fantastically spooky imagery. There are puppets made of meat. The writers clearly have a lot to say about creativity, creative control, and the muse, using puppetry as its motif and its metaphor. It has things to say about the connection between madness and creation. There is mutilation, there is Cronenbergian body horror. There seems to be a thematic connection to Thomas Ligotti, one of my favorite writers.

I’ve scratched my head plenty trying to figure out where it falls down for me.

Ella (Aisling Franciosi) is essentially chained to her ailing mother, helping her eat, helping her create her stop motion animated film. When her mother suffers a stroke that hospitalizes and kills her, Ella moves, with the help of her boyfriend, into an abandoned apartment that will be her home and studio. She runs into a young girl (Caoilinn Springall) who seems to be a free-floating entity with no family, no friends, no connection, and therefore no connection to reality.

The girl suggests, and then insists on, taking over the direction of Ella’s project. She introduces a simple plot of a young woman being visited by a monster three times—fairytale territory. She insists also on the change of the medium from clay to decaying flesh.

Ella’s friends pretend encouragement, but they hire her on not as an animator but as a glorified temp. Worse, they plagiarize her story. Her boyfriend is no help, caring mainly about his own creative work as a musician. As the film progresses, things get weirder, especially when a supposedly drug-induced hallucination straight from Ella’s mind encounters her in her room.

And for such a cerebral story, it ends in a bloodbath.

Stopmotion, as I’ve said, has a lot to say—but it’s a little muddled and unclear. I think my main issue with the movie is its direction. The story calls for oneiric, Lynchian direction rather than the straightforward, pedestrian way in which it’s presented (apart from one jarring, almost beautiful sequence with curious projections and a leering, looming clown puppet, that is).

There’s a lot to recommend in Stopmotion—my objections shouldn’t turn anyone away. I’ve watched it three times trying to figure out how I feel about it, and the fact that I felt it worth multiple viewings speaks well of it.