‘Stopmotion’ Review: An Unsettling Confrontation of Corporeality in Art

“Stopmotion” takes your classic, tortured-artist psychological horror and wraps it up in a sensory nightmare. Robert Morgan’s feature-length debut combines live-action and stop-motion to tell the story of Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a stop-motion creator working on a film for her overbearing, arthritic mother who previously had a successful career as an animator. After her mother’s stroke, Ella befriends a peculiar girl in her studio apartment complex, prompting her to pursue a personal project. As her new film progresses, Ella’s life starts to spiral out of control. In the movie’s uncanny meta exploration, filmmaking blurs the line between reality and animation. Morgan, with his brilliant use of stop-motion, creates a surreal and inextricably audio-visual experience that is disconcertingly stunning and nauseating. The film’s aesthetic reflection of art, life, death, and everything in between simultaneously explores and reimagines the horror genre.

In the movie’s opening scene, a girl that the viewer will later learn is Ella, stands at a party staring into the camera. A variety of green, yellow, and red lights flash around her. As she approaches the camera in abrupt cuts, her facial expression varies in each one. The scene resembles a stop-motion sequence, foreshadowing the obfuscation of where the animated world ends and the live-action one begins.

“Stopmotion” is filled with contradictions that cleverly manipulate the audience’s understanding of corporeality through motifs of life and death. When Ella first arrives at her new apartment, she meets a little girl who asks her why she does stop-motion animation.

“I do it because I like it, and I’m also good at it,” she says. “And because it feels like you’re bringing something to life.”

This feeling is especially relevant when Ella starts to pursue her new project and animates the little girl’s story of the Ashman, a monstrous entity that is in pursuit of a girl for reasons unspecified. She creates the figures out of mortician’s wax, raw meat, and roadkill — objects of death that are resurrected to give new life to the carnal vessels in Ella’s film.

Ella’s own corporeal existence is further challenged through visceral depictions of self-mutilation, both consciously and subconsciously. Her self-mutilation, however, does not limit itself to gore. Ella’s physical disfiguration materializes through the equally perturbing transformation of her flesh into mortician’s wax, serving as its own medium for artistic expression.

The sound design also takes on a life of its own, contributing to a cacophony of sound that heightens the viewer’s awareness of bodily processes. Morgan’s use of sound is, in fact, one of the initial indications of the discombobulation of Ella’s creative and personal worlds. In the stop-motion narrative, the Ashman appears to the little girl every night for three nights, knocking on her door three times. The first time the knocking is produced, it starts in the diegetic space before bleeding into the sound of Ella’s apartment buzzer in real life.

The sounds are structured to denote a sense of hypersensitivity. Every gruesome sound seems to palpably reverberate through viewers’ ears, evoking sensations mirroring the characters’ experiences. This effect, typically associated with stop-motion productions, is replicated in the live-action of the film. In a particular sequence, Ella becomes aware of the project’s toll on her mental health and resolves to leave the studio to her boyfriend. In this montage, the sound of breathing hangs in the background, indicating that while Ella has physically left the apartment, she can never truly be separate from her artwork.

Narratively, the film progresses alongside the development of the Ashman. As the little girl tells Ella the story, she slowly divulges the interactions between the Ashman and the stop-motion girl each night. The story unfolds on screen like a ticking time bomb, waiting to reach its climax on the third and final night. Aisling Franciosi is exceptionally convincing as Ella as she is able to fully embody the identity of a tortured artist. Her portrayal of obsession and psychosis, with minimal dialogue, both captivates and terrifies.

However, the film’s narrative is also the source of its greatest setbacks. Without the film’s gorgeous visual cues and outstanding sound design, “Stopmotion” would merely exist as a set of clichés: The obsessed artist that succumbs to psychological madness, a creepy little girl, and an overbearing, controlling parent. Many of the characters suffer from two-dimensionality, and Ella herself could have benefitted from further character development so the audience could better grasp her motives and relationship to her art.

Despite these details, the originality of the cinematography, visual effects, and sound design more than makeup for whatever the production lacks in the narrative department. The artistic choices ultimately transfigure what would otherwise be a narrative filled with overdone tropes into a physically provocative cinematic masterpiece.