2024’s Stopmotion recently left me frustrated, and I thought hard about why that was. I didn’t find anything in it to be scary, but there were some respectably creepy moments. It is very much in the mold of contemporary, art-house horror, yet it still has more of a plot than many similar films I have seen in the past few years.
Aisling Franciosi is an aspiring filmmaker in the titular form, the daughter of a domineering mother (Stella Gonet) who is a legend in the field of that particular type of film. After Gonet has a stroke that puts her in a coma, Franciosi tries to finish the work she had been doing with her mother, only to be inspired by a creepy little girl (Caoilinn Springall) to make a very different film.
That new film has a simple premise, wherein a girl is fleeing an abomination called The Ash Man. She hides in a house but, for each of three consecutive nights, the villain will knock on the door three times. Each time, something different will happen. Springall toys with Gonet, only doling out the story in small amounts over time, and each time only after Franciosi agrees to fulfill the next in a series of increasingly disturbing requests.
One of the problems with Stopmotion is it has a premise almost as simple as the film within the film. When you take away trappings such as inanimate figures seemingly to take on a life of their own, you have a relatively straightforward tale of a descent into madness. It’s like the film was made solely because the filmmakers hoped Kier-La Janisse would write a sequel to her House of Psychotic Women and include this in it.
It is no surprise much of what transpires is happening in Franciosi’s head. From the first moment we see Springall, I assumed she was a product of the animator’s imagination. There are some neat hallucinatory moments, such as Franciosi sinking her fingers into her shin as if her skin has been transformed into the mortician’s wax she has been using to sculpt figures. Alas, there are also such boilerplate elements as a drug-fueled party where a film loop of a ventriloquist dummy is projected onto a wall. Yes, such objects are genuinely creepy, but they are as overused as clowns in horror cinema, and this particular one does not factor into the plot.
I think the biggest problem with the picture is how curiously predictable it is, especially for a film that so desperately wants to be weird. As you can tell by the Ash Man’s story, the script loves to do everything by threes. So, there is a certain logical progression one should be able to recognize when Franciosi makes the first characters out of that mortician’s wax, then Springall insists the corpse of a fox must be dismembered and used to make better figures. Care to hazard a guess as to what material would make, in Springall’s esteem, the best stop motion puppets of all?
As for the performances, Springall is the real star here. Her characterization is genuinely unnerving without going over the top. Franciosi is believable as a stressed animator losing her grip on reality, but there isn’t much nuance or complexity to the role. I never believed there was anything more to this character than what we see during the runtime. Gonet is especially good as the coldly manipulative mother. I would have liked to have seen more of her, except additional use of the character would have been unnecessary. The rest of the main cast is Tom York as a seemingly considerate boyfriend you just know is going to be revealed as an asshat, and Therica Wilson-Reed as his duplicitous sister, who just happens to also be a stop-motion animator.
There is a certain satisfaction in seeing a good tale told well, even when it is predictable. That’s why I like many movies from the first few decades of sound cinema. But Stopmotion doesn’t have much a story, and its ideas of “weird” have been cliché for some time now. Everything in the film is telegraphed in a monologue Franciosi imagines behind delivered by her comatose mother: “You’re a puppet caught in your own strings. And when it’s not me pulling them, it’s somebody else. And when the puppets are done with their play, then it’s back in their box.” I eventually tired of my strings being pulled. More to the point, I was tired of my chain being yanked.
Dir: Robert Morgan
Starring Aisling Franciosi, Caoilinn Springall, Stella Gonet
Watched on Vudu (after which, I immediately cancelled my pre-order for a blu-ray, which I think says something about my feelings towards the film)