Disc Reviews

Stopmotion Blu-ray Review

• 25th Jun 2024

Enter Stopmotion, a British psychological nerve-tingler about a stop-motion artist, Ella, living under the abusive rule of her stop-motion artist mother.  When the mother suffers a collapse, Ella finds herself trying to complete the work but embarks instead on a wildly divergent dark spiral into madness with a new stop-motion project that tests her very nerves, sanity, and the patience of those around her.

Stopmotion isn’t just for fans of stop-motion animation, but David Lynch fans will find a surreal edge to this they might find comfortable with and David Cronnenberg fans will have some body horror aspects to appreciate. Throw in a seasing on Jan Svankmajer and you get this as a potential result.

The stop-motion idea running through the film doesn’t always make sense if it’s trying to run parallels. The idea of obsession, obsessive behaviour, being a prisoner to that behaviour and what it propels Ella into doing also doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, but it’s artfully directed, well played and stands out from the mass of horror films out there.  Well worth deviating to purely to see something not normal, but at the very least fascinating. This is a fairly effective, creepy and unsettling little art horror.

There are a couple of decent interviews by the lead actress and the director that are worth checking out and a fairly by the numbers behind the scenes making of. Not a strong package, but not vanilla either.

Steven Hurst

Special Features 

• Interview with Aisling Franciosi
• Interview with director Robert Morgan
• Behind the scenes

Stop Motion is out on  1 July 2024