Stopmotion (2023)

This article contains spoilers for Stopmotion (2024).

Stopmotion is a psychological horror film about all the bullshit—from drugs to creative directors, to day jobs, to your own dumb brain—that tries to get between you and your ability to create.

Ella (Aisling Franciosi) lives in the shadow of her mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet). Suzanne is a respected stop-motion animator who has been stricken by severe arthritis. She has an intense need to finish one last film before she dies, but her condition makes it impossible for her to accomplish this on her own. She’s unable to manipulate her puppets or even do day-to-day things like cut up her own food, and she relies on Ella to be her hands. 

Ella, in turn, relies on Suzanne to be her brain, at least creatively. She’s also an aspiring animator, and, like Suzanne, she’s driven by the need to create but finds herself with the opposite problem. She has the physical ability but lacks ideas—or at least the confidence to manifest those ideas.

As Suzanne’s condition (and mood) worsens, she puts more pressure on Ella to help finish her film—ultimately lashing out at Ella during a shoot. Ella, in turn, starts to distance herself from her mother. We expect this to get worse, but before that can happen, Suzanne suffers a sudden stroke and falls into a coma. Ella is left to finish her mother’s film, and we, as an audience who is sick to death of ‘ruminations on grief’ and ‘metaphors for trauma,’ roll our eyes and think, “Great, another shitty Hereditary clone.” 

Screenwriter Robin King and Director Robert Morgan have other plans, though. Instead of putting Ella up against some foul demon that represents—or beats us over the head with—yet another expression of familial trauma, Stopmotion uses the titular (and wonderfully creepy) stop-motion animation to depict Ella’s artistic struggle as she learns how to let go and embrace the creative process. Her mother’s incapacitation is the catalyst here, but all of the people in Ella’s life represent some obstacle to pure creativity. What’s important is that Ella is forced to go on this journey of self-discovery, to overcome her self-doubt, and to let the creative process overtake her. 

The performances are all solid, but this singular focus on Ella and her mental state comes at the cost of developing the other characters. Ella’s mother and boyfriend serve mostly to move the plot along, and while their performances are good —particularly, Stella Gonet as the somewhat sympathetic but as mean as anyone might be in her position Suzanne—Franciosi and Springall do most of the heavy lifting. This lack of development might be a little off-putting to some, but it’s integral to the story; any more focus on them, and this becomes a different (and, in my opinion, less interesting) film.

Stopmotion won’t be for everyone. Its pacing is methodical, some of its characters are thin, its narrative is allegorical, and its ending is vague, and for those reasons, I suspect it will be divisive. Personally, though, I fucking loved it. The creepy stop-motion, claustrophobic photography, and oppressive sound design masterfully illustrate a feeling that is extremely relatable as I bang my head against the keyboard at three AM—on a school night, no less—in hopes of eventually farting out a passable piece of content. It’s sort of rare, I think, to find a contemporary film like this—one that is thoughtful and abstract while still being gross enough to appeal to my inner gorehound—and I am looking forward to seeing what the creative team behind Stopmotion do next.