Folks on the prowl for monstrously uncanny thrillers need to prioritize Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion. The award-winning short filmmaker’s hallucinatory feature debut remarkably blends stop-motion with live-action like it’s a commonplace horror practice. Its themes stoke the harmful fires that entrap creative types who lose themselves in their projects, recalling the delicious instability of Prano Bailey-Bond’s delirious Censor or Peter Strickland’s sonically sinister Berberian Sound Studio. Morgan bleakly and ingeniously captures what it means to be a “tortured artist,” hybridizing an icky yet alluring stop-motion style that feels like a collaboration between claymation celebrity Lee Hardcastle and slasher legend Leatherface.
Aisling Franciosi of The Nightingale and The Last Voyage of The Demeter fame stars as Ella Blake, an aspiring stop-motion filmmaker under duress. Ella’s overbearing mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), can no longer continue her legendary stop-motion career due to crippling arthritis. Ella’s primary role is as Suzanne’s caretaker and co-creator on her last project before she passes, but Ella feels more like an assistant than an equal partner. That’s until Suzanne suffers a stroke and is hospitalized, leaving Ella to her own devices as she decides whether to carry out her mother’s dying wish or start anew. Ella chooses the latter with the help of a curious child roaming around her new apartment complex (played by Caoilinn Springall), which morphs into something bizarre as her ideas—primarily a ghoulish woodland entity dubbed the “Ashman”—begin to invade Ella’s daily routine.
Morgan does a tremendous job making Ella’s handcrafted characters feel inhuman but alive. Ella ditches felt and fuzzy materials for steel armatures and mortician’s clay, molding putty people who resemble escaped delinquents from Phil Tippett’s Mad God. The introductions of raw meat underneath waxy flesh only add to the disfigured take on human anatomy, like our figure was lumpily reshaped by stone hands.
Ella’s trying to imagine something that doesn’t resemble realism, but in doing so, bastardizes our selves in an unsettling way. The Ashman feels a bit Tar Man-esque for Return of the Living Dead fans, which is a delight to see portrayed under costume by James Swanton. Reality and stop-motion blur as Ella’s creations hop off the table or grow to human sizes, opting not for the sharpness of Henry Selick’s figurines but for irregular distortions—these are nightmares, not Hot Topic merchandise.
The surrealist self-destruction that is Ella’s downfall hits upon hard introspective truths, yet periodically lingers on inevitable plot beats. Neither Morgan nor co-writer Robin King hide the obvious or play dumb; Stopmotion is openly linear about the narrative Ella journeys. She’s drunk off a tonic of grief, inadequacy and industry-specific toxicity that sends her into a depressive tailspin. Franciosi’s performance doesn’t miss, whether steeped in Ella’s vulnerable outbursts or her suppression of deranged thoughts. The minuscule issue of wanting to “get there,” the film’s withheld third act, momentarily overtakes an otherwise arresting personality dissection. Stopmotion requires patience, much like Ella’s profession. It’s a scintillating slow burn that teases us by inching towards its reality-bashing payoff, maybe too clearly at points.
Stopmotion wades into macabre folkloric whimsy as Springall’s adolescent accomplice builds Ashman’s lore in real time. Morgan and cinematographer Léo Hinstin enhance those vibes by coaxing absurdist art-school horrors out of drug-laced party scenes, or by rolling over midnight forest sets like a weightless fog. Its photography mirrors how Strickland shoots Berberian Sound Studio or his death-by-fashion flick In Fabric, illustrious and fabled despite the razor-toothed material. Morgan eases our minds into accepting Ella’s inability to decipher what reality and her animations look like, until rotting meat puppets seem like old friends. There’s a clever game afoot that doesn’t spring The Ashman’s in-apartment form on us too early, before we’ve warmed to the notion. Ella’s out-of-body gaze when spilling trippy fears to her boyfriend Tom (Tom York) keeps the frayed figments of her mind properly in question, although a few interactions with Tom and his concept-stealing sister Polly (Therica Wilson-Read) do feel like they inorganically delay the inevitable.
Morgan’s feature debut is as stunning, diabolical and boundary-pushing an emergence as any filmmaker could hope to achieve. Stopmotion is brazenly original and delicately unhinged, well-intentioned to let us marinate in Ella’s poisonous behaviors. We’ve seen movies where unhealthy obsessions devour artists, but never with stop-motion freakshows rising from an inexplicable beyond to haunt their makers. It’s fresh, it’s ferociously unique and it’s goddamn fantastic—three important “F” words. I cannot wait to see what Morgan has in store next after making a statement like Stopmotion.
Director: Robert Morgan
Writers: Robert Morgan, Robin King
Starring: Aisling Franciosi, Stella Gonet, Tom York
Release Date: February 23, 2024
Matt Donato is a Los Angeles-based film critic currently published on SlashFilm, Fangoria, Bloody Disgusting, and anywhere else he’s allowed to spread the gospel of Demon Wind. He is also a member of the Critics Choice Association. Definitely don’t feed him after midnight.