A stop-motion animator is consumed by the grotesque world of her horrifying creations with deadly results. A film by Robert Morgan, starring Aisling Franciosi, Caoilinn Springall, Tom York, Therica Wilson-Read, and Stella Gonet.

Legendary stop-motion animator Suzanne Blake (Stella Gonet) struggles with arthritis. Determined to finish what could be her final film, she enlists her daughter Ella (Aisling Franciosi) as an assistant animator. The process is meticulous. Each day, Ella must move the characters mere millimeters at a time, following her mother’s precise instructions. With each painstaking movement, Ella captures a photo, inching the animation forward frame by frame.

Suzanne isn’t pleased with the footage of a scene Ella worked on for hours. She tells Ella they’ll have to reshoot it. During dinner, Ella offers to help her mother’s film with some ideas. However, Suzanne does not respond to her daughter’s offer. Instead, she only gives her a cold stare. The next morning, Ella finds Suzanne waiting at the workshop. Suzanne asks Ella to sit and tell her about the idea. Speechless, Ella can only mutter inaudible words. Suddenly, Ella realizes she doesn’t have any ideas of her own. Having always been told what to do, she never developed the ability to think independently.

The next day during the shoot, Suzanne suffers a stroke and falls into a coma. Shocked and confused, Ella is unable to focus on what to do next. Ella’s boyfriend, Tom (Tom York), advises her not to go back to her mother’s home and stay with him instead. Tom also offers Ella a room in his apartment complex to finish Suzanne’s stop-motion film. But without her mother’s guidance, Ella struggles to continue the project by herself.

After Tom left the apartment, Ella encounters a mysterious girl (Caoilinn Springall) who appears to be living in the same building. The girl takes much interest in Ella’s work. Ella explains the process of her work and the basic technique of stop-motion to the girl. Ella also shows the girl Suzanne’s unfinished film about a cyclops who trades one eye to the Gods to see her future but sees her own death. However, the girl is not impressed, asserting that she finds the story boring. Intrigued, Ella asks the girl how she would fix the film. Instead, the girl advises Ella to make a new film with a better story. Then the girl begins to tell a story of a lost girl who wanders in the woods because someone is coming after her.

Ella ponders the girl’s idea, somehow losing track of time. When she wakes up, she feels a pang of sadness and confusion as she sees dismembered cyclops figurines scattered on the floor. The stage is completely transformed. Checking her computer, Ella is shocked and confused to find a stop-motion footage of a girl figure wandering in the woods, exactly as described by the mysterious girl. But she has no memory of creating it.

Driven by the mysterious girl’s story, Ella abandons her mother’s film and throws herself into her own project. The mysterious neighbor girl reappears, critiquing the realism of the lost girl figurine. She propose an unorthodox solution: using raw meat found in the trash to create a more lifelike figure. Initially repulsed by the idea, Ella argues it’s too late to alter the character’s appearance. But the girl’s relentless pleas and teasing about withholding the story’s next chapter eventually wear Ella down. She relents, incorporating the raw meat into the figurine. The mysterious girl is satisfied, so she reveals the next part of the tale: the lost girl is pursued by a a terrifying figure known as the Ash Man.

Ella’s twisted mind gradually surfaces, betraying a fascination with blood and flesh wounds. The film initially suggests this is a result of drugs obtained from Tom’s sister Polly (Therica Wilson-Read), but later reveals otherwise. The mysterious girl reappearing unexpectedly fuels the theory that she’s not real, but a figment of Ella’s imagination. Torn between fear of the Ash Man coming after her and the fear of failure, Ella follows the mysterious girl’s bizarre suggestion, incorporating dead fox skin and teeth into the Ash Man figurine.

Directed by British filmmaker Robert Morgan in his directorial debut, STOPMOTION features a compelling psychological thriller premise. The protagonist, having been in the shadows of her mother her entire life, attempts to find her own creative voice, but ultimately succumbs to the darkness of her delusional mind. While the main cast delivers great performances, particularly Stella Gonet as the manipulative and controlling mother and Caoilinn Springall as the creepy mysterious girl, the film suffers from its slow pacing. The director employs lingering shots and slow motion to build tension, but often, nothing significant happens. These scenes feel like padding, stretching the film’s runtime.

The incredible sound design is further elevated by Lola de la Mata’s unsettling score, creating truly suspenseful moments. The figurines themselves are brilliantly memorable – exceptionally grotesque yet strangely captivating, drawing us in as the story unfolds. I particularly enjoyed the final act, where the figurines come to life, evoking classic Puppet Master vibes. And the scene of Ella transforming into a wax figure is also creative and well-executed. However, the film has a couple of weaknesses. The scene of Ella’s violence at the end, while not entirely unexpected, left me wishing for a different narrative turn. Additionally, the film’s conclusion mirrors the vision Ella’s mind conjures of her mother (not her real mother), which felt like a missed opportunity for another twisted ending.

STOPMOTION premiered at Fantastic Fest on 24 September 2023. The film had its limited theatrical release in the United States on 23 February 2024, by IFC Films.