🎞️ Stopmotion Review: A Disturbing Horror Movie Where Art Comes to Life
My Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ☆ 4.3/5
Stop motion animation normally requires patience. Move the puppet, take a picture, move it again, and repeat that thousands of times until something that was never alive suddenly appears to move. This Stopmotion review looks at a 2023 British horror film that turns that slightly unnatural process into a nightmare. It is a story about an artist, an obsession, and a puppet film that refuses to stay on the workbench. It is strange, handmade, and genuinely disturbing.
Stopmotion Review: Making Handmade Animation Horrifying
Stop motion animation normally requires patience.
Move the puppet.
Take a picture.
Move it again.
Take another picture.
Repeat that hundreds or thousands of times until something that was never alive suddenly appears to move.
Director Robert Morgan takes that slightly unnatural process and asks a very good horror question:
What if the thing you were bringing to life should have stayed dead?
Welcome to Stopmotion.
The film played the 2023 festival circuit, including Fantastic Fest in Austin and the BFI London Film Festival. IFC Films released it in American theaters on February 23, 2024, before it moved to rental services and the Shudder streaming service. It was made with support from the BFI Film Fund and runs 93 minutes.
This Stopmotion review stays spoiler free. The film's later surprises are best discovered frame by frame.
Meet Ella Blake
Aisling Franciosi plays Ella Blake, a stop motion animator working under the enormous shadow of her mother, Suzanne.
Suzanne is an acclaimed animator.
She is also demanding, controlling, and increasingly unable to physically complete her work. Arthritis has crippled her hands, so Ella moves the puppets while her mother barks orders.
Ella has spent years helping bring her mother's artistic vision to life.
The problem is figuring out whether Ella has a vision of her own.
Suzanne is played by Stella Gonet, a veteran British actress seen in The Crown and Spencer. She makes Suzanne a fierce, cutting presence whose influence lingers long after she leaves a room.
Aisling Franciosi Has to Carry This Movie
Much of Stopmotion rests on Aisling Franciosi.
Many viewers will know her as Lyanna Stark from Game of Thrones. She also won an Australian Academy Award for Best Actress for Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, and she starred in The Last Voyage of the Demeter.
Ella is not a conventional horror heroine being chased by a monster.
She is an artist becoming increasingly consumed by the thing she is creating.
Franciosi has to make us question Ella without losing our interest in her. She plays Ella's tension in small, physical ways, especially through her tense hands and her fierce focus on the work.
As Ella's relationship with her work changes, so does the entire movie. Critics widely singled out Franciosi's performance as the anchor that holds the film together.
Stop-Motion Animation Is Already a Little Creepy
Let's admit it.
There is something inherently strange about stop motion.
Objects move when nobody is touching them.
Faces change between individual photographs.
Tiny figures suddenly appear alive.
Usually that is charming.
Robert Morgan sees something darker in it. In his director's statement, he describes animators as people sitting alone in dark rooms, bringing lifeless puppets to life. He says the process has the air of necromancy about it. He even notes that the name itself is a contradiction, static yet moving, dead and alive at the same time.
Stopmotion looks at exactly the same process and finds the nightmare hiding inside it.
Then Ella Meets a Little Girl
After Ella begins working independently, she encounters a mysterious young girl who becomes interested in her animation.
The girl is played by Caoilinn Springall, who appeared opposite George Clooney in The Midnight Sky.
The girl has ideas.
Lots of ideas.
She begins suggesting a story for Ella to animate.
At first it almost seems helpful.
Then the story starts getting darker.
And the materials needed to tell it become considerably more unpleasant.
Springall is excellent. She is sweet one moment and quietly unsettling the next. The scenes between her and Franciosi are some of the most uncomfortable in the film.
The Ash Man Is Not Going on a Children’s Television Show
One of the central creations in Ella's new film is a figure known as the Ash Man.
That name alone should tell you we are a long way from Wallace and Gromit.
As Ella develops the story, the characters and imagery become increasingly disturbing.
The little animated world on her workbench starts feeling considerably less separate from the real one.
Morgan has described the Ash Man as something that might not exist for anyone else, but feels very real to Ella. That uncertainty is a big part of what makes him so frightening.
The Puppets Are the Stars
The handmade figures are one of the movie's biggest attractions.
They are imperfect.
Textured.
Fragile.
And physical.
You can almost imagine touching them.
Creature effects artist Dan Martin designed some of the film's most grotesque figures, and the stop motion animation was directed by Andy Biddle. Their work moves with a deliberately jerky quality that feels wrong in the best way.
That tactile quality matters because Stopmotion is a movie about somebody physically constructing horror one tiny piece at a time.
Computer generated perfection would not have had the same effect.
Robert Morgan Was Exactly the Right Person to Make This
Director Robert Morgan came to the film with decades of experience creating unsettling stop motion shorts.
His award winning shorts include The Cat with Hands, The Separation, and the gleefully grotesque Bobby Yeah. He also directed a segment of the horror anthology The ABCs of Death 2. His shorts have screened at festivals including Sundance and collected more than 60 international awards.
Stopmotion was his first feature film. He co-wrote it with Robin King.
That background shows.
He understands both the enormous amount of work involved in animation and why handmade figures can become so disturbing when photographed the right way. Critics have compared his style to the Brothers Quay, early David Lynch, and the painter Francis Bacon.
Stopmotion is not a filmmaker using animation as a gimmick.
It is a filmmaker turning his own artistic medium into the source of the horror.
This Movie Is About Making Something
Underneath the horror is something anyone who creates things may recognize.
When is a project finished?
When is it good enough?
How much of yourself should you put into your work?
And what happens when finishing the thing becomes more important than everything happening around you?
Morgan has said the film is about how far artists will go for their art, and how that drive can become destructive. The idea came from his own experience. While making a stop motion short, he felt his creation had developed a life of its own that he could barely control.
Ella does not simply want to make a movie.
Increasingly, she needs to make it.
That is where things become dangerous.
The Materials Keep Getting Worse
At the beginning, we are dealing with ordinary animation materials.
Clay.
Wire.
Fabric.
Tiny sets.
Then Ella's new project starts demanding something different.
I am not going to tell you exactly where that goes.
Discovering what she is willing to use is part of the experience.
Let's simply say that a trip to the craft store is not going to cover everything on Ella's supply list.
Reality Starts Getting Difficult to Trust
As Ella becomes increasingly obsessed with her project, Stopmotion begins blurring the boundary between her animated story and the world around her.
Is something actually happening?
Is Ella imagining it?
Is the film influencing her?
Or is she influencing the film?
Morgan designed the film to start in a fairly realistic world and slowly erode into a hallucinatory nightmare. Ella's run down apartment block, called the Barons, mirrors her inner decline. As her mind frays, the world around her frays too.
The movie does not rush to hand us comfortable answers.
That is exactly how psychological horror should work.
The Sound Design Does a Lot of Dirty Work
Pay attention to what you hear.
Scraping.
Cutting.
Squishing.
Tiny movements.
Tools against materials.
Morgan wanted super detailed sound work that matched the tiny, precise movements of an animator. Composer Lola de la Mata adds an eerie, hypnotic score on top.
The sound design makes the physical process of building puppets feel uncomfortably intimate.
Sometimes the sound of something being made is nastier than watching it.
Stopmotion Gets Under Your Skin
Literally?
I am not answering that.
Figuratively?
Definitely.
This is not a movie built around a huge body count or a masked killer chasing teenagers through the woods.
Its horror comes from obsession, texture, physical transformation, and the increasingly uncomfortable relationship between an artist and her creation.
Some critics compared it to Roman Polanski's Repulsion, another story of a fragile young woman slowly losing her grip. Morgan himself has named Lynch, Polanski, and Cronenberg as the kind of filmmakers he hoped to echo.
Don’t Look Up the Puppets Before Watching
The creatures are one of the pleasures of the movie.
Do not search for every image.
Do not watch clips of the later animation.
And definitely do not read detailed explanations of what happens to Ella.
The less you know about where her project is headed, the better.
This Kilroy review is not going to spoil it.
This Is a Slow-Burn Horror Movie
This warning matters.
Stopmotion is not In a Violent Nature with puppets.
It takes its time.
There are quiet stretches devoted to Ella working, thinking, watching, and gradually becoming consumed by the project.
Some critics felt the story stretches thin in places, even while praising the animation and the performance. That is a fair warning for anyone who prefers a tighter, faster horror story.
Viewers wanting nonstop scares may find it slow.
Viewers willing to sink into its strange little handmade world should have a much better time.
The Animation Makes Stopmotion Different
There are plenty of movies about artists losing themselves in their work.
There are plenty of psychological horror movies where reality becomes uncertain.
There are not many that can use genuine stop motion animation as part of both the story and the horror itself.
That is the hook.
The medium is not decoration.
It is the reason the movie exists.
Critics responded to that originality. The film holds a strong positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus highlights Morgan's excellent effects work.
Is Stopmotion Actually Scary?
It is more disturbing than traditionally scary.
There are not monsters constantly jumping out of dark closets.
Instead, the movie slowly makes ordinary creative materials feel wrong.
Clay.
Puppets.
Scissors.
Wire.
A camera.
A workbench.
By the end, things that looked harmless at the beginning may not feel harmless anymore.
Who Should Watch Stopmotion?
Watch Stopmotion if you enjoy psychological horror, body horror, strange animation, and practical effects. It also suits fans of movies about artistic obsession, slow burns, and stories where reality gradually stops behaving normally.
Animation fans who love the eerie side of the art form, like the work of the Brothers Quay or Jan Švankmajer, should find plenty to admire.
Anyone expecting a straightforward slasher should probably look elsewhere.
Ella's nightmare moves one frame at a time.
Final Thoughts 4.3/5
This one earns a 4.3 out of 5 from Kilroy. Wrapping up this Stopmotion review, the film is a striking, handmade nightmare from a filmmaker who knows his craft inside and out.
"A handmade nightmare that crawls inside your head and stays there."
ML Lamp, Kilroy Was Here Shop
Stopmotion finds horror in one of the oldest forms of movie magic.
Take something that is not alive.
Move it slightly.
Photograph it.
Move it again.
Repeat until you have created the illusion of life.
Robert Morgan understands exactly why that process can be beautiful.
He also understands why it can be creepy as hell.
Aisling Franciosi gives the strange handmade world a human center, while the puppets provide images that are difficult to forget.
Stopmotion is not going to work for viewers who need constant action.
But if you are willing to watch an artist disappear deeper and deeper into her own creation, this is one little movie that can crawl inside your head and stay there.
After watching Stopmotion, that innocent lump of clay on the workbench may deserve a second look.
