Stopmotion (2023) And the Unfulfilled Horror Potential of its Stop-Motion (Review)

I’m sure that the film synopsis for Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion was churned out on a conveyor belt in a factory built especially for making things I will love. Here we have all the basic elements. 

It’s called, and uses, the medium of stop-motion. Check.

It’s a low budget horror that isn’t afraid to creep under my skin. Check.

It features its main character going steadily more insane. Check again.

It’s got some really decent talent behind it too. Aisling Franciosi is the main star, fresh off recent critically-acclaimed roles in The Nightingale and Black Narcissus, and Robert Morgan has been a prolific short filmmaker for many years now, melding both stop-motion and live-action. This is his feature-length directorial debut, and while it’s a solid attempt at translating his short film efforts into a full film experience, Stopmotion can frustratingly feel like less than the sum of its parts. 

That’s not to say that most of the parts aren’t used effectively, because they are and we’ll get to these, but on the whole I found that Stopmotion sadly wasted its potential and delivered a film that was just merely fine.

Stop-motion (the animation type, not the film) when used effectively for horror is stunning. The uncanny imagery of 2022’s The House still unnerved me on a recent rewatch, and of course the way that Henry Selick and Neil Gaiman’s fantasy world twists and unwinds (I promised myself I’d pare back on talking about it, so let’s just call it “the C word”) in the form of stop-motion has traumatised and shaped an entire generation. Morgan’s film certainly has some of this, that’s for sure. 

Franciosi’s Ella is spurred on to continue making stop-motion films after her animation-obsessed abusive mother slips into a coma, and her animation style is certainly one for creeping out its viewers. The human characters look blurry and unfinished, the facial expressions are primitive and uncanny, and the sound design often went right through me. As we saw Ella making her stop-motion film, we hear every single sound cue from little squishes, childlike yelps and moans, and abrasive bits of music, and it all went right through me. It’s top-notch sound design, it’s really uncomfortable and eerie and gives the film a lot of its atmosphere.

Franciosi is also fantastic too. We know from The Nightingale that she’s got phenomenal range, and while her character is very much a quiet social outcast, an understated performance can still be a powerful one, and she certainly delivers. There’s an intriguing sense of weariness to her performance, which not only fits the character but makes it all the more interesting when the character of Ella begins to deteriorate both physically and psychologically as the film progresses.

Sadly, from here I’ve mostly got issues. I’ve mentioned that Stopmotion is less than the sum of its parts, so just to clarify: it’s not the elements here that are the problem, what Morgan does with them is where the frustration lies.

For one thing, Stopmotion has got a modest supporting cast, made up of Ella’s boyfriend, played by Tom York (not that one), her mother, and a young girl from the opposite flat, played by Caoilinn Springall. She was seen just the other week in the Doctor Who episode Boom, and with that episode and this, she’s proving that she’s a great young talent. 

Her character’s purpose is a little underdeveloped though. In some ways, that’s the point, since there’s obviously supposed to be some mystery here, but she almost appears too much for the mystery to be able to sink in, and she can feel like unnecessary baggage. Again, that’s nothing to do with the actress who’s doing a great job, but it was like Robert Morgan didn’t know quite what to do to make this character work.

The rest of the supporting cast pull the short straw too. The boyfriend is a complete non-entity, and Ella’s mother only serves to give her some good motivation and emotional weight, rather than serve as a well-rounded character. We get a great scene with her at the start, but that’s about it.

Perhaps my biggest gripe with the film comes from the animation style and the title: stop-motion. I’ve already given my examples as to how stop-motion can be used to create fantastic horror, so when I saw that this was being used in a live-action capacity, I couldn’t have been more excited. Unfortunately Morgan misses the chance to get scares from the animation, and instead resorts to the normal live-action techniques that have already been milked to the bone by countless horror films.

It’s not that the horror in Stopmotion isn’t well-executed. There’s some really solid bits of gore that are suitably revolting and gross, and Franciosi helps sell them to remind us that all this is happening to a human. But they are just normal scares that you can get from most horror films. There’s little creative use of the stop-motion medium here, which is a shame as when they show the progress on Ella’s film the stop-motion looks wonderfully creepy and repulsive. There’s a few good moments in the third act, but I really wish the stop-motion animation had played a greater part in the film’s horror. There’s no creative use of nightmarish stop-motion creations, like the Other World unravelling into something terrifying in “the C word”, which is a shame as the 15 rating meant they could’ve gone a lot further with this.

I don’t want to sound too pessimistic about Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion. It does get a lot of things right, with a fantastic lead performance, an intriguing look at the life of a tortured artist and some really good scares. Sadly, for as much as it excels at the basics, it neglects its most unique asset which is the stop-motion medium, and instead uses it in uneventful and predictable ways that don’t give the film much personality and originality. The supporting cast are wasted, the plot developments feel vague and confused, and the film really misses the chance to capitalise on its full stop-motion potential. It’s frustratingly ordinary, when it could’ve been extraordinary like Coraline.

Dammit I said it, didn’t I?

Alex’s Archive – Stopmotion