Released: 15th March
Seen: 5th May
In 2022 the legendary animator Phil Tippett released a little stop-motion film called Mad God which showed that stop-motion animation could be used pretty effectively to create a feature-length horror film. The weird jerky motions of the animation and otherworldly designs blended to create nightmare fuel that lives on in the minds of anyone who saw that film. Well now it’s 2024 and another director has taken on the idea of stop motion being used to tell a horror story, only they’re going to be more direct and use the idea of making a stop motion film to help create the horror… they’re going to be so direct that the film is literally called Stopmotion, you can’t get more direct than that.
Stopmotion tells the story of Eliza Blake (Aisling Franciosi), a young woman who is helping her mother Suzanne (Stella Gonet) to finish off Suzanne’s magnum opus, a stop motion animation film about a cyclops. Suzanne unfortunately can’t finish the film on her own due to her arthritis and so she has put Eliza to work, often overworking her to the point of it being genuinely abusive. The more time goes on, the worse the relationship goes until one day Suzanne has a stroke and is placed in the hospital where she stays in a coma. Eliza decides she’s going to try to finish Suzanne’s film and while doing so ends up meeting a mysterious young girl (Caoilinn Springall) who likes the animation but thinks the story is boring so she suggests a new story – that story turns out to be a true nightmare for Eliza.
Using a clever blending of live action and the titular stop-motion, Stopmotion creates one of the eeriest feelings you’ll find in a film this year. There’s something so completely unnerving about the creatures that make up the stop-motion parts of the film that it’s hard not to feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up whenever they’re on screen. Their weird uncanny looks help get the audience caught off guard which means that when Eliza starts behaving strangely and things go off the rails, it amplifies the horror of it all. It’s certainly a slow burn and mostly working with surreal imagery over your standard jump scares but it all works to create a tone that slowly crescendos into something that’s just gloriously fucking insane.
Stopmotion’s slow burn is powerful, letting the tension of everything get more and more intense with every passing second. Every scene is so weird and out of left field that there’s no earthly way of knowing which direction they are going, you can try to guess but the film is going to throw curve balls at you every chance it can get and it’s damn near impossible to keep up with it. The disorienting style makes every weird bit of imagery work even more effectively, allowing the blend of live-action and stop-motion to feel a lot more believable. Scenes where the stop-motion creatures interact with the human characters, are just captivatingly horrifying in so many ways.
Admittedly, while being pretty captivating, it’s also a very weird film with a strange subject matter and several insanely odd-looking characters (as to be expected since they’re meant to be characters made out of morticians’ wax and a dead fox, they’re going to look weird) and that weirdness might put this film out of the tolerance level for some people. There’s a lot of strange gloriously surreal imagery that clearly wants to be there to help with the larger story about creating art and trauma and all that but it’s also easy to see that some of the images that are being created might just be too weird for some people. It also doesn’t help that the opening scene contains this blog’s favourite thing, strobing lights used to create a stop motion effect on the main actress (because of symbolism) and while it’s at least somewhat justified because it ties into the central idea, it’s still strobing lights and those will never stop annoying me.
Still, even with that surreal imagery and the annoying strobe lights, Stopmotion is such an original and unique film that it’s hard not to be in awe of it. Its central performance manages to keep everything moving towards the bonkers conclusion and by the end, it might be hard to describe everything that’s been shown, but it’s all pretty damn unnerving and horrifying. Stopmotion is definitely not going to be the kind of film that appeals to everyone, it has ‘cult film’ written on it in such giant letters that it would be hard to imagine it being anything other than an underground oddity that people throw out to show they don’t only watch mainstream horror films but it’s so gloriously weird and unique that it’s also a definite must-see, just to know what wonderfully weird things can be achieved with the combination of stop motion and live action. It’s dark, it’s weird, it’s a little fucked up and that’s just how a good horror film should be.
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