Photo courtesy of DatBot via Wikimedia Commons.
By Sarah Berger ’27
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Warning: This story contains spoilers for the movie “Stopmotion”.
In a time when plenty of horror movies seem uninterested in originality, “Stopmotion” elevates a common concept through excellent character design. This alone makes it worth watching, though you probably won’t be able to look at steak the same way again.
“Stopmotion” follows Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a stop-motion animator whose life is dually dominated by her mother and her clay creations. When Ella’s mother becomes incapacitated, she is left to finish her mother’s project alone, until a mysterious girl comes to her with gory ideas about what Ella should create.
Thanks to advances in CGI and technical effects, the last few years of horror have yielded some genuinely terrifying antagonists. “Possum” (2018) comes to mind as a film that utilizes sparse aesthetics and one striking element to create a feeling of abject terror.
However, CGI can be overused, leading to movies lacking plot and relying on gore. “Stopmotion” definitely falls into the first camp. The parts of the movie that are actually in stop-motion are visually stunning, including a particularly memorable scene where a puppet made of mortician’s wax bursts into a land made entirely of golden fabric. It blends seamlessly with limited effects to create an incredibly uncanny effect.
The live-action scenes are worse by comparison. The lighting is drab, the sets are sparse and the rooms are recognizable as staged. Although this parallels Ella’s focus on clay over real life, it makes for an occasionally boring viewing experience.
Thankfully, “Stopmotion” has a genuinely interesting creative concept. Just looking at the clay figures is enough to send chills down the spines of even the most seasoned horror watchers. With such strong potential antagonists, it would have been easy for the writers to go down the traditional horror route, following in the footsteps of movies like “Annabelle” (2014), “Child’s Play” (1988) or “Dead Silence” (2007). Had they followed that trend, the dolls would have likely haunted Ella, a few murders would have occurred and it would have been a watchable but predictable movie. Instead, it looks deeply at psychosis, overworking, and the consequences of a society that doesn’t prize creativity.
The mysterious girl who approaches Ella is the main driver of the plot. At times, the dialogue between the two comes off as more cliched than creepy. Rather than experiencing a feeling of creeping claustrophobia, the viewer might find themself wondering why Ella keeps giving in to this strange girl’s demands or why no one in her life seems to care.
The trigger for Ella’s mental breakdown is her mother’s stroke and ultimate death, but it’s difficult to understand why she remains under her mother’s spell for so long. The stroke occurs right at the start of the movie, but so much of the movie relies on Ella’s mother that it would have made sense for her to be a more prominent character. The excellent acting ultimately saves the drab characterization. Franciosi stuns as Ella, and her performance lingers long after the film ends.