If Aardman hired David Cronenberg to reboot ’80s Plasticine scamp Morph, it might look a bit like this creepy collision of body horror and stop-motion craft. It’s a wildly inventive spurt of bug-eyed British gore that pulls the innards out of the creative process. Quite literally, at some points.
Game of Thrones’ Aisling Franciosi was a torrent of female rage in rape revenge thriller The Nightingale. Here, the anguish is channelled inwardly as her stop-motion filmmaker Ella Blake grasps for the inspiration to finish her puppet film, gradually losing her moorings in the process.
It doesn’t help Ella’s state of mind that her twisted fairy tale is set in a tangled wood where a trembling puppet is stalked by a grotesque figure called the Ashman. Or that she lives under the shadow of her disapproving mother (Stella Gonet), a legendary animator incapacitated by a stroke and content to sit at her shoulder pointing out what she’s doing wrong. Boyfriend Tom (Tom York) is handsy rather than helpful.
‘Great artists always put themselves into their work,’ whispers her neighbour, played with impish glee by nine-year-old Caoilinn Springall. She’s a cheery poppet who slowly morphs into a malicious muse, with the unnamed girl soon dishing out the darkest notes imaginable – at least one involving a Stanley knife.
It’s a wildly inventive spurt of bug-eyed British gore
The psychological scares stem from the medium itself by debut director Robert Morgan and are underlined by composer Lola de la Mata’s skittering electronica and quiet chorales. Stopmotion feels born out of the sheer mental challenge of being trapped in a room with macabre creations that come to life over weeks of painstaking labour. It’s not hard to imagine how those creatures, along with the draining act of creation itself, might become all-consuming.
Morgan has an impressive and icky back catalogue of stop-motion shorts – and a cult following online – and he brings storytelling chops to the live action scenes too. The darkness falls in increments here, until Stopmotion lets rip in a Grand Guignol climax with at least one dare-you-keep-watching moment. It’s not the subtlest ending. But it leaves a mark.
In US theaters now.
