Stopmotion

STOPMOTION, recently released via streaming service Shudder UK, has made its Blu-ray and DVD debut and non-subscribers can now watch Robert Morgan’s twisted and rather gory stop-motion/live-action hybrid complete with bonus material.

To put it upfront, STOPMOTION is a bit of a ‘Marmite movie’: you either like it or you don’t – there’s little scope for anything in between. The story revolves around stop-motion animator Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi) who has a tough time not only looking after her ailing mother Suzanne (Stella Gonet) – herself a highly acclaimed stop-motion animator – but due to Suzanne suffering from severe arthritis of the hands, Ella is forced to finish her mother’s latest project for her. Unfortunately, her domineering mother always finds fault in Ella’s efforts, leading to her becoming overworked and ultimately almost indifferent to mother’s plight. “I want to finish the film before I die” explains a seemingly cold and domineering Suzanne though death might be closer than she thinks when she suffers a stroke and needs to be hospitalised.

Despite Ella’s boyfriend Tom’s (Tom York of ‘Poldark’ fame) kind offer of letting her stay in his apartment during her mother’s time in hospital, Ella – driven by an insatiable desire to succeed in her craft, politely declines, instead renting her own apartment so she can finish Suzanne’s project. Some days later, a little girl (Caoilinn Springall) appears seemingly out of nowhere. She says that she lives in the same apartment block and takes a keen interest in Ella’s project – so much so that she dismisses the current storyline as ‘boring’ and suggests something entirely different, namely a story about a young girl lost in the woods. Incredibly, and after all those weeks of hard and frustrating work in finishing her mother’s film, Ella discards the project and begins work on her own film, with a story as suggested by the young girl.

This scenario in itself provides some vital giveaway clues: Firstly, ‘lost in the woods’… could it be a metaphor for Ella’s increasingly fragile state of mind? Secondly, why would Ella listen to a girl that appears out of nowhere and doesn’t even seem to have a name? For one, she never introduces herself and then, Ella never asks the girl what her name is. This would suggest that the girl in question is in fact not real but an extension of Ella’s subconscious and highly artistic mind – a mind which takes on an increasingly unhinged and violent form…

When the girl complains that the dolls which Ella uses don’t appear realistic enough, once again she comes up with a suggestion – this time to use raw steak on some of the doll’s limbs to give the impression of real human flesh and Ella complies. As the stop-motion story progresses, another character is introduced into the plot, a male doll called ‘Ash Man’ who stalks the female doll in her cabin. Ella’s ‘new friend’ once again suggests that the Ash Man needs to be made of something more realistic. The solution comes when both Ella and the young girl are wandering through the woods (a girl lost in the woods…) and the girl points towards the carcass of a fox. Was the animal already dead or was it killed for the project? Carrying the carcass back to her apartment, Ella proceeds to dissect him and uses part of the flesh for the Ash Man.

From that point onward, reality and fantasy begin to merge more and more, for example, when Ella hears a knock on the door and – looking through the peephole – spots the bloody eye of the Ash Man, this time round as a life-size doll which has seemingly come to life… In between, Ella has a nasty run-in with her boyfriend’s sister Polly (Therica Wilson-Read), herself an animator (a lot of animators around, or so it would seem…) who sets her up by offering her a job in the studio she works for, only that this involves crafting numerous eyeballs instead of working on stop-motion. When Ella accuses Polly of having plagiarised her own idea, she destroys Polly’s set in a rage. As Ella’s relationship with the patient Tom grows increasingly strained, her ambitions take on an ever more violent and bizarre shape, eventually culminating in a complete mental meltdown with deadly consequences…

There are echoes of the Brothers Quay stop-animation ‘Street of Crocodiles’ to be found here but also, as already pointed out by my Film-News colleague Paul Chapinal, who reviewed the film’s ‘Shudder’ release back in May, director Robert Morgan took inspiration from surreal master-animator Jan Švankmajer and from Polanski’s 1965 psychological horror ‘Repulsion’ starring Catherine Deneuve.

While there is much to admire about STOPMOTION, the overall result feels a little unbalanced at times, with an almost agonisingly slow pace at the start (not helped by the complete lack of incidental music) before things finally begin to take shape (no pun intended). Both Aisling Franciosi and Caoilinn Springall (as her demented alter ego?) in particular are to be commended for their performances though Tom York’s character is very much underused here. STOPMOTION is director Morgan’s feature film debut and it remains to be seen what he will come up with next.