STOPMOTION
Starring: Aisling Franciosi, Caoilinn Springall, Stella Gonet, Therica Wilson-Read, and Tom York
Director: Robert Morgan
KATIE
Robert Morgan’s feature debut, Stopmotion, tells a familiar tale of an artist being consumed by their work in a similar vein to Saint Maud and Censor, but it is elevated by the deeply unsettling use of stop-motion animation combined with compelling live-action performances. The stop-motion creations are the stuff of nightmares, and they imbue the film with a distinctively creepy quality, emphasised by its spine-tingling sound design. Aisling Franciosi is amazing as Ella, delivering a performance that embodies her character’s emotional journey and anchoring the viewer’s engagement with the story. Overall, Stopmotion delivers on both style and substance.
PAIGE
Stopmotion is a nightmarish film directed by Robert Morgan that explores the psychological agony of an artist's fixation with pouring too much of oneself into their work. Even though the concept is intriguing and has the potential to be thematically rich, the delivery of the ideas is often too obvious, dull in dialogue, and missing pieces of the narrative. The story just isn’t developed enough to feel like a coherent movie. In my eyes, this would’ve worked much better as a short film. However, I will say that the stop-motion animation used throughout the movie is really eerie.
CALEB
For a scrappy, low-budget horror flick, Stopmotion manages to pull off some really impressive sequences. All the stop-motion scenes are wildly creative, so it’s a shame that the rest of the movie pales in comparison to them. The acting ranges from decent to mediocre, the cinematography is drab (outside of the animated sequences), and some of the editing and sound mixing decisions are frustratingly tacky. The narrative itself is rather uninspired too, delivering on most of the “elevated” clichés that you’d expect from a horror movie about a tortured artist. While Stopmotion has some great ideas, it never fully manages to take shape.
NICK
Although, conceptually, it's a fun idea, Stopmotion - much like the execution of the film's subject - is very tedious. I was all in on the eerie wax characters and every second that the film used stop-motion animation, but those moments were sadly fleeting. Instead, I got a film bogged down by one dimensional human characters, a muddy plot, and an unnecessary hallucinogen-fueled cut scene. All director Robert Morgan had to do was tell the story of an animator trying to make a spooky film as it begins to take hold of her, and we were set. Sometimes less is more.