STOPMOTION - Mark Reviews Movies

Stopmotion, IFC Films / Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 22, 2024

A psychological horror tale of obsession and feeling like an imposter, Stopmotion feels as if its screenplay comes more from a template than anything genuine. It plays this material in a way that comes across as checking boxes off a list of genre requirements, and the only element that's unique is the hook of the protagonist's occupation and passion.

She's Ella (Aisling Franciosi), the daughter of an acclaimed filmmaker who has made a fine career—well, as fine as possible in a niche medium that has faded with technology—in the field of stop-motion animation. Suzanne (Stella Gonet), the mother, currently suffers from severe arthritis in her hands, making the minute manipulation of miniature models impossible, so Ella has to do all of that work, while also serving as her mother's live-in caretaker.

That relationship shows some promise, even if it is familiar. Suzanne treats her daughter as if she's something to be controlled, with her preferred pet name for Ella of "Poppet" making that point as clear as her stern attitude, her impatience, her overly critical nature, and the way she shoots down any of the daughter's ideas or suggestions. Presumably, having grown up around this art form means that Ella is just as or nearly as talented as her mother, if not more so, but she has never had a chance to do anything outside of Suzanne's shadow.

With that dynamic in place, the screenplay by director Robert Morgan and Robin King tosses it aside and more or less forgets about it. There are, after all, even more familiar and generic ideas to get to here.

Alone for the first time in a while, Ella now finds herself in a position to take some control of her own life and work. She could finish her mother's movie, or maybe it's time for her to begin a project of her own. There's yet another potentially intriguing notion at the start of this new section of the story, in that Ella has plenty of technical know-how but comes up short in imagining an idea toward which she could that expertise to use. Maybe her mother was right about her in some ways, but since Suzanne is out of the picture at this point, it's pointless to bring her up in the conversation about Ella anymore.

Instead, the plot follows a clichéd trajectory with all of the components we might expect. Does Ella begin to lose her grip on reality? Of course, she does. Do the lines between the real world and her new project begin to bleed together, leading her to dreams and/or visions and/or mental breaks in which she becomes like a puppet or literally one? That's pretty much the bulk of the both the movie's attempts at horror, as the models come to life or she sees herself made of wax, and its thin plot, which watches as she rather quickly retreats into her obsession to finish her own animated movie.

On top of that, we also get an eerie kid, a little girl (played by Caoilinn Springall) who lives in the same apartment building and gives Ella the idea for a scary story to animate. It's about a girl lost the woods, alone and afraid and being pursued by a shadowy figure. The interludes of that project, as well as Ella's nightmarish hallucinations, are overseen for the movie by Andy Biddle, and they're easily the most effective and imaginative parts of the narrative.

The rest of it is almost too predictable and repetitive to even bother with summarizing. Anyway, Ella continues to lose herself in the movie, keeps encountering the little girl in ways that make her actual purpose in the story plain early on, starts taking the design of her characters to further extremes (using raw meat from the fridge and moving on to rawer meat directly from the source), and wrecks the few relationships she has left, mainly with a boyfriend (played by Tom York) who primarily exists for the climax. Occasionally, Morgan and King tease us with some ideas about the way art is so easily commercialized, but if the troubling relationship between a mother and daughter seems to get in the way of the movie's more obvious goals, that thematic through line doesn't stand a chance.

Franciosi, a great actor, is compelling and sympathetic in the central role. However, Stopmotion only cares about the performance and the character so far as they both match the requirements and expectations of this tale, which doesn't have much to say about creativity, fixation, or a breaking mind. They're just the means to the customary ends of a mostly bland horror movie.

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