‘Stopmotion’: London Review

Dir: Robert Morgan. UK. 2023. 93mins

A young stop-motion animator is driven to the edge of sanity by her own creations in the atmospheric feature debut from award-winning short filmmaker Robert Morgan (The Separation, Bobby Yeah) which effectively explores the often-toxic relationship between art and artist. A strong central performance from Aisling Franciosi anchors a narrative which is stretched rather thin in parts, and some genuinely creepy animation also helps power this intriguing British horror. As evidenced by its wins at Fantastic Fest and Sitges, where it played ahead of a London berth, the horror community in particular will appreciate its off-kilter aesthetic, and that could help it find an audience when it is released in the US and select international territories by IFC Films in 2024 before heading to Shudder.

Some genuinely creepy animation helps power this intriguing British horror

Having previously impressed in TV shows The Fall and Black Narcissus and as the lead in Jennifer Kent’s visceral revenge thriller The Nightingale, Franciosi (a former Screen Star Of Tomorrow) is immediately compelling as Ella, a quiet 20-something who is helping her mother Suzanne (Stella Gonet), a legendary stop-motion animator, on her latest film. As Ella makes painstaking adjustments to the small model, Suzanne — her hands made useless by arthritis — frustratedly barks orders. This is clearly a fractured dynamic, and Ella’s feelings of suffication by Suzanne’s formidable shadow will manifest themselves in increasingly bizarre ways.

When Suzanne suffers a stroke and falls into a coma, Ella decides to finish her mother’s work and moves into a dingy apartment in an empty block, helpfully facilitated by her boyfriend Tom (Tom York), who works at a builders firm. This silent, decaying building, filmed in disorienting, off-kilter angles by DoP Leo Hinstin (As Above, So Below; Nocturama) is a fitting backdrop for Ella’s increasingly bizarre stop-motion creations. When she meets a young girl (Caoilinn Springall), who feeds her a creepy story about a monstrous, predatory being called The Ashman, Ella feels compelled to bring this terrifying tale to life, working with materials that graduate from felt and mortician’s wax to a fox carcass — and beyond. 

With shadowy lighting and an oppressive colour palette, occasionally pierced by flashes of sickening neon (such as in the mesmeric opening club-set sequence), Stopmotion is deliciously unsettling straight from the off. Visually, it is reminiscent of Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor,  and also brings to mind Matthew Holness’s equally-as-unnerving Possum, about a puppeteer whose psychosis is distilled through his creation. Here, Morgan’s expert creative choices constantly send chills down the spine — not least the deployment of deliberately jerky stop-motion elements (with hideous creature design by Dan Martin) which start to spill over, horrifyingly, into reality. Ben Baird’s sound design is visceral and sticky, the otherworldly creaks and rustles of the animated characters bleeding insidiously into the live action. Under this sensory assault, our concept of reality becomes as compromised as Ella’s.

Narratively, the screenplay by Morgan and Robert King is not quite so confident. There is not a great deal of explanation for Ella’s psychological breakdown, other than she is herself the puppet of her domineering mother, and simply does not know what to do when the strings are cut. The appearance of the strange little girl and her control over Ella brings the narrative into some rather more obvious emotional territory, and there is a hint that, perhaps, Ella is using her work to work through her own buried traumas — although this is never fully explored.

Yet Franciosi’s compelling portrayal of the spiralling Ella overcomes this narrative weakness and effectively draws an audience into her singular experience. As the film becomes more extreme, Morgan effectively blending psychological and gory body horror elements, Franciosi keeps a tight grip on her character, pouring Ella’s obsessive focus into her work. And when the levee finally breaks, Ella has become so much a part of her creation that its impossible to work out where one ends and the other begins.