
No, that's not creepy in the slightest
dir: Robert Morgan
2023
Stopmotion is the kind of flick you could only recommend to die-hard horror fans. I don’t mean people who’ve occasionally seen popular horror films that everyone else sees and think “oh yeah I don’t mind the occasional jump scare”.
No. If you watched this flick and liked it, and recommended it to people willy nilly, you could end up arrested. The most likely reaction would be whoever you recommended coming back to you, slapping you in the face and screaming “what the fuck were you on when you recommended Stopmotion to me? Do you hate me that much?”
They probably won’t speak to you again, either. Maybe you planned it that way?
I don’t know, you’re a complicated person with a lot on your plate. Maybe a 10-year-old’s birthday party wasn’t the best place to play it.
Regardless, this is a very disturbing, very nasty little film, about how working on stop motion animation is so slow and pain-staking that it drives its practitioners mad, absolutely stark raving bonkers. And then the murders start, and that’s not even the worst thing.
This flick is mostly what we would call psychological horror, with extreme body horror thrown in as well. It is, I am pretty sure, intended to make you feel queasy. Every time anyone (me) talks about a movie, of course you have to mention other movies in order to (lazily) give people reference points. I’ve seen a lot of reviews say “it’s like this movie, or reminiscent of that one”, but the one it reminded me the most of, despite having a completely different story, was the great film from ages ago called May, staring Angela Bettis, from way back in the early 2000s.
What’s that? You’ve never heard of May? Well, it’s not much of a reference point, then, is it? Let’s just say I always feel uneasy around any pair of scissors I ever see, thanks to that film.
Stopmotion has as its lead the great Aisling Franciosi. Aisling Franciosi might not be a household name, but she should be, because she’s great, which is the best circular argument I’ve come up with recently. She was tremendous in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, as an Irish victim of colonialism / misogyny in Van Diemen’s Land determined to get revenge at any and every cost, she was great in a flick no-one saw last year called Voyage of the Demeter, and she carries this entire film.
And what a brutal, unpleasant, discomforting horror film it is.
Right from the start the film does us and its lead an unkindness, by clearly implying the lead is dangerously deranged. There is a scene of Ella (Aisling Franciosi) staring straight out at the audience with a fixed expression as a sequence of strobing coloured lights make it look like she’s cycling through all possible facial expressions, microseconds at a time.
It doesn’t bode well. Let me further preface this review (ugh) by saying I am probably going to pepper certain statements throughout referring to the main character’s mental state. My references will probably be ill-informed, negligent, glib and hurtful to either sensible people or those who either struggle themselves with mental illness or have close loved ones struggling with it. It’s not my intention to make light of people’s struggles, or to mock them, but it’s probably going to happen anyway. I’m sorry in advance.
Ella Blake works in stop motion animation with her mother (Stella Gonet), who is apparently a legend in the field. A real Ray Harryhausen, or Henry Selick, or Helena Smith Dayton, even. Ella’s mum, who I won’t dignify with a name, is really mean, and exacting. She both rubbishes everything Ella does and constantly gives critiques on everything Ella does whether they’re animating something or not. The mum’s hands, you see, riddled with arthritis. I would call them flippers, but flippers would be more useful.
Somehow, in between doing hours and hours of work (for a few seconds of footage) and looking after her mother, who she clearly hates from the start, Ella has time for a boyfriend, for socialising and for shagging, so good on her. The boyfriend is nice and handsome and very helpful, but also has a nosy sister who seems to rub Ella up the wrong way, maybe because she’s blonde? The sister also seems to work in the field of stop motion animation (I hear it’s a tightknit community), but in advertising, so maybe that’s the real source of Ella’s contempt.
Ella is, after all, a true artist, despite the fact that she has no inspiration herself, no ability to make her own stuff, no ideas about stories she wants to tell, to animate, to bring to life. She is so dominated by her mother that she can’t even set herself in motion, like a stringless puppet. Like one of the felt cyclopses in the dioramas she moves around with her mother’s exacting instructions, millimetres at a time, she can’t move herself.
Thankfully, once the mum has a stroke for some reason, Ella can feel a bit of freedom, taste life etc. What disturbs me the most about this dynamic represented is that while naturally I would relate to a character who has to look after an elderly parent, having experienced that situation myself, I would guess without consulting anything that I am closer in age to the mother in this flick than the daughter character. Very disturbing.
For reasons not entirely clear to me Ella’s boyfriend finds her a place where she can live and work away from where she was living and working before, even though there’s now nothing stopping her from ruling the roost at home, with her mother in a coma (I know, I know, it’s serious).
But then if a girl mysteriously appeared at the house she lived in with her mum, it would look, uh, somehow stranger?
This small child (Caoilin Springall) is a bit of a fucking brat. My favourite scene with her involves the way she drains a juice box, scrunches it up and just drops it on the floor before sashaying out of the place.
But this child has the ability to direct Ella, to tell Ella what to do and what to animate. So she abandons her mother’s final film (about some cyclops shenanigans) and starts crafting a story about a girl lost in the woods pursued by some awful guy called the Ash Man.
Instead of felt puppets, Ella makes these figures with mortician’s wax, as if things weren’t creepy enough. But apparently they aren’t, because the little girl insists that to make the film ‘better’, Ella should use ‘different’ materials. After all, there is this dead fox nearby, and using its flesh will make things more horrific.
It might come as no surprise to you that events, as depicted in the stop motion animation Ella is creating, to some extent start happening outside of the diorama, or the film. Also, Ella watches certain sequences as if for the first time, meaning she doesn’t remember filming them. But she must have, because who else would bother?
What follows from here is that there’s not much debate in the audience’s mind that a lot of what Ella is experiencing is possibly not happening in the real world. There is a bravura party scene where we are meant to think that Ella is seeing and hearing things in a hallucinatory way because she’s tripping on acid. And yet later we find out acid had nothing to do with it.
That Ella is profoundly disassociating from reality is pretty obvious pretty early on, so it’s not so much a question for us as to how much of this is real and how much of it is because Ella is totally bonkers. If it shares anything with a film like, say, Rose Glass’s Saint Maud from a few years ago, it’s that, yes, the main character is fucking nuts, but at least in that film, which I didn’t think completely worked, it at least kept you guessing for a while as to whether Maud’s experiences were through religious ecstasy or just because she was psychotic.
Stopmotion doesn’t toy with us like that. Ella is completely psychotic from the start, we fear, and we’re not really given any precipitating event beyond the frustration of working in the field of stop motion animation, which would be enough to send most people loopy, or maybe some unspoken abuse at an earlier age rising up through the lens of her dissociative state and her “art”, or that maybe looking after her mother sent her round the twist.
Mothers, eh? They always blame the mothers.
The film, just like the animated film at the heart of the narrative, gets progressively nastier, uglier, viler up to its practically chilled out ending which belies all the awful stuff that happens at the end. The very ending is chill, but the stuff that happens before it, ye gods, it would be hard to watch even for devoted fans of body horror (which I’m probably not). It is horrifying stuff, although there are plenty of scenes that are just as disconcerting without being as graphic. One that stopped my heart was relatively mundane in comparison, but it involves Ella touching her thigh in the shower, and not being sure if she’s made of flesh or mortician’s wax.
That. Was. A. Lot. I think Aisling does great with a difficult part, but it also left me a bit baffled in the end, even as I accept that she might have been in the depths of psychosis, some of her worst actions at the end don’t make a lot of thematic sense. But that’s just me. This was always going to go to the most extreme and final of destinations, and of course I’m quibbling about the cost of the train tickets along the way.
Sure, it’s gory, but the sickening use of stop motion animation (for such evil) heightens what would otherwise be a singularly nasty trawl through the mind of someone with a lot of rage towards their mother.
Kudos all round, especially to the animators. They must be so tired, and cranky, and deserving of pay rises.
8 times I wouldn’t do anything to piss them off if I were you out of 10
--
“A great artist always puts themselves into their work” - Stopmotion
- 380 reads