Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Robert Morgan
Starring: Aisling Franciosi, Stella Gonet, Tom York, Caoilinn Springall, Therica Wilson-Read
Aisling Franciosi puts the animator in Reanimator as a demented
Nick Park in writer/director Robert Morgan's feature debut
Stopmotion. A kindred spirit of Prano Bailey-Bond's recent British horror
Censor, Stopmotion also casts a rising Irish actress as a
withdrawn young woman who becomes consumed by her work. In this case
it's the work of a stopmotion animator, which when you think about it,
makes for the perfect horror movie protagonist/antagonist. After all,
the stopmotion animator is something of a Baron Frankenstein who brings
still (or dead) objects to life.
Franciosi's Ella is a budding young animator who has spent her life in
the shadow and under the thumb of her oppressive mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), a legend in her field. With Suzanne struck by increasingly crippling
arthritis, Ella acts as her mother's hands, making the intricate and
minute movements required to bring her mother's claymation and puppet
characters to life. Suzanne constantly berates her daughter for not
possessing steady enough hands. As Ella makes the detailed adjustments,
Suzanne's own hands move as though puppeteering her own daughter with
her apron strings.
When Suzanne suffers a stroke and ends up in a coma, Ella decides
she'll finish her mother's film. With the aid of her boyfriend, Tom (Tom York), who works for a building firm, she's able to move into an empty flat
in a deserted tower block that appears set for demolition at some future
point. The only other resident of the building appears to be a
precocious little girl (Caoilinn Springall) who insists on
befriending Ella, whether she likes it or not. At first Ella views the
girl as a distraction, but when she gives Ella some ideas for her film
that just might work, the little girl becomes a collaborator.
Following her pint-sized producer's instructions, Ella discards her
mother's film and begins one of her own. It involves a young girl who
finds herself lost in the woods, where she is stalked by a creepy figure
known as "The Ashman" (if you've seen the Nathan Fielder show
The Curse, this moniker loses some of its creepy effect). But in animating The
Ashman, she may have brought something malevolent into her own
dimension.
Since the 1990s, Morgan has been creating short animations, often with
dark themes, and was a contributor to the 2014 horror anthology
The ABCs of Death 2. It's the incorporation of his animation that gives his live-action
feature debut a distinctive atmosphere, as otherwise it's something of a
jumble of various horror tropes. On one hand it's a descendant of films
like House of Wax and A Bucket of Blood, in which murderous artists incorporate their "victims" into their
work, and receive accolades in the process. Ella follows the little
girl's suggestion that the young girl of her film would be a more
realistic puppet if it were made from a leftover steak. She's also
convinced to construct The Ashman from the carcass of a fox the little
girl discovers in the woods nearby. As Ella grows more unhinged and
consumed by her work, we begin to suspect the project may require human
meat.
The film also owes a lot to Cronenberg, as along with her mental
health, Ella begins to physically deteriorate, picking at scabs to see
if there's a human underneath her flesh or simply an armature like one
of her creations.
It's the use of stopmotion animation that makes these tropes feel
simultaneously fresh and indebted to a lost era of horror filmmaking. As
the line between Ella's reality and her work begins to blur, the
stopmotion makes the leap from her tabletop stage as it infiltrates both
her dreams and her physical being to gruesome effect.
Franciosi is fantastic in the sort of role usually played by aging male
British thesps or nervy young men. There's something of Anthony Perkins'
Norman Bates in her performance as Ella withdraws into her own reality
when the loss of a domineering matriarch casts her adrift in a world
she's unprepared to negotiate alone.
As Ella shuns all offers of collaboration from her social and
professional network in favour of taking guidance from the little girl,
whom we assume early on is a product of her damaged psyche, Morgan
appears to be making a statement on the frustration of filmmaking, an
artform where even the most single-minded of artists are forced to
compromise via collaboration. I'm sure Morgan had to compromise a lot in
making Stopmotion, and he no doubt found working with humans more stressful than
puppets, but his singular vision is enhanced greatly by his
collaborators, particularly Franciosi, who keeps us in her thrall, frame
by frame.
Stopmotion is on Shudder from May 31st.
