Stopmotion (film)

Stopmotion is a 2023 British live-action/adult animated psychological horror film directed by Robert Morgan in his feature-length debut, from a screenplay he wrote with Robin King.

The film stars Aisling Franciosi as a stop motion animator who becomes increasingly obsessed with a film she is working on. Stopmotion was released on 23 February 2024 to critical acclaim.

Plot
Unable to use her hands due to arthritis, stop-motion animator Suzanne Blake enlists her daughter Ella's help in completing her most recent film, often overworking Ella. When Suzanne suffers a stroke and falls comatose, Ella resolves to finish the film on her own.

Ella's boyfriend, Tom, invites her to live with him while Suzanne recovers, but Ella instead chooses to rent a studio apartment to continue finishing the film. She encounters a young girl living in the same building, who curiously asks her about the project. She calls the story "boring" and presents Ella with a different story about a young girl lost in the woods. Ella discards the original project and begins to bring the film to life. The girl visits once more and complains that the figures don't look real enough, insisting to use spoiled steak for the dolls to emulate flesh. Ella hesitantly complies.

The girl continues her vision of the story, stating the young girl is hiding from an entity called "the Ash Man". Ella forms the figure but the girl denies it, insisting that the Ash Man must be crafted out of "something dead", so she offers a fox carcass. Ella refuses and the girl consequently pauses the storyline's resumption. Ella asserts she can figure that out on her own, though a creative block ensues and she's out of ideas to continue. Ella asks Tom's sister, Polly, to give her some LSD in the hopes it will inspire new ideas. Desperate, Ella remakes the Ash Man puppet using the fox carcass. That night, she hallucinates the Ash Man staring directly at her through her peephole, mirroring a segment from the film. Tom finds her passed out in her apartment, whereupon she realizes that she simply animated the Ash Man approaching the girl's door, and that the acid Polly gave her is still in her pocket untouched. Polly, also an animator, sets Ella up with a job at the studio she works for. Her initial beliefs that she was hired as an animator are squandered when she is told to craft eyeballs, and she figures out Polly has plagiarized her film. Enraged, she destroys the set Polly created.

The girl resumes the story, stating the Ash Man touches the girl, but Ella uncomfortably refuses to include it, instead deciding that the girl successfully escapes. After experiencing another hallucination of the Ash Man pursuing her, Ella awakens in the hospital with an injured leg. She is visited by Tom, who says her project has gone too far and tells her of his plans to go to her apartment and demolish the set. Ella insists she be the one to do it, and Tom agrees on the condition that he is allowed to watch. Ella then learns that Suzanne has passed away.

Back at her apartment, Ella strangles the girl to death, only for her to reappear unharmed seconds later and comfort Ella as she cries. The girl demands that the Ash Man be remade with something bloodier. Ella removes the stitches on her leg and pulls out a strip of her own muscle. She is discovered by Tom and Polly, who attempt to rush her back to the hospital, but she kills them both and uses their flesh to create life-sized figures of the little girl and the Ash Man. The Ash Man then stalks towards Ella and the girl, who fearfully proclaims that this isn't part of the story. Ella allows the Ash Man to accost her and eat from her face, now made of mortician's wax. Ella then enters a cabin in the forest identical to the one in the film, where the girl is watching footage of Ella bleeding to death on her apartment floor. She tells Ella she loves the film. Ella smiles at her before stepping into a satin-lined box and closing the lid.

Cast

 * Aisling Franciosi as Ella Blake
 * Stella Gonet as Suzanne
 * Tom York as Tom
 * Therica Wilson-Read as Polly
 * Caoilinn Springall as Little Girl
 * James Swanton as The Ash Man
 * Joshua J. Parker as Will
 * Jaz Hutchins as Brett
 * Bridgitta Roy as Doctor

Production
Ahead of the Cannes Film Market in June 2021, Wild Bunch International revealed the project by Robert Morgan, who will make the jump from short films to his directorial debut feature film from a script he wrote with Robin King. Aisling Franciosi was cast as the lead for the film. The film received the fourth largest amount of production funding from the British Film Institute for 2022, at £905,000.

Principal photography began in February 2022, and was completed by April.

Release
Stopmotion had its world premiere at the 2023 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas on 24 September 2023. It was then screened at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival on 7 October 2023.

The film was released in select theaters in the United States on February 23, 2024 by IFC Films.

Critical response
In a positive review, Meagan Navarro of Bloody Disgusting wrote, "When so many filmmakers opt for style over substance, the style is substance here. Morgan surprises with an immersive sensory assault. Art and storytelling collide in breathtaking yet revolting fashion. Morgan's knockout debut opens up the veins of a turbulent artist, delivering one creepy melding of mediums to an unsettling, powerful degree." Variety's Dennis Harvey wrote, "Robert Morgan unquestionably has a knack for the extraordinary; it is both a measure of his talent and of its limits that this debut feature stumbles only when it tries to do something on the ordinary side." The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis said, "Like the art form it celebrates, Stopmotion is careful, patient and almost punishingly focused, with Franciosi bringing the same intensity that made her role in The Nightingale (2018) so devastating."

In a more negative review, Peter Sobczynski of RogerEbert.com wrote, "Although it clearly wants to be seen as some kind of wild hallucinatory exploration into the heart of madness, Stopmotion eventually reveals itself to be little more than a collection of barf-bag visuals and tired conventions that are occasionally enlivened by some nifty animation and the strong performance from Franciosi." Steven Scaife of Slant Magazine wrote, "beyond the methodical scenes of Ella at work, the live-action sequences that dominate the film add little to the lengthy history of horror stories about someone slowly unraveling in isolation... It's as if the film's plot is puppeteered by earlier horror films, and in a similar fashion to the initial scene of Ella dutifully following her mother's instructions."

Accolades
In the main competition at the 2023 Fantastic Fest, Morgan won Best Director for his work on Stopmotion. It was also awarded the Special Jury Award in the Official Fantàstic Selection at the 56th Sitges Film Festival in Catalonia, Spain.