There’s a dreadful innocence to the tiny puppets that drive “Stopmotion,” an unusually resolute horror tale that places a spiraling animator at the mercy of her handmade figures and her own disturbed mind.
Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a talented artist, is herself a puppet, forced to act as the hands of her fearsome mother (Stella Gonet), a storied animator who’s suffering from a degenerative disease.
“I don’t have my own voice,” Ella complains, resentfully moving the dolls millimeter by millimeter on her mother’s barked instructions. But when tragedy frees Ella to make her own stop-motion film and she moves her materials into a vacant housing block, she becomes anxious and hesitant. Accustomed to taking orders, she’s easily compliant when a strange little girl (Caolinn Springall) from a neighboring apartment suggests a darker direction for Ella’s film, one that requires mortician’s wax and a dead fox. This is exactly as gruesome as you might imagine.
Weaving an eerily single-minded spell from the puppets’ squished-jellybean faces and misshapen limbs, the director and animator Robert Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature. Like the art form it celebrates, “Stopmotion” is careful, patient and almost punishingly focused, with Franciosi bringing the same intensity that made her role in “The Nightingale” (2019) so devastating. As Ella’s grip on reality loosens and she begins to cannibalize her own body to give life to her dolls, the movie erases any distinction between the desire to create and the will to destroy.
A bloody meditation on artistic agency and its submission (especially when it comes to female artists), “Stopmotion” isn’t perfect, but each element moves in lock step to forge a deeply troubling intimacy between Ella and her repellent figurines. I could have done without that fox, though.
Stopmotion
Rated R for self abuse and stolen innards. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.
