I saw Stopmotion

Director Robert Morgan's Stopmotion, which he co-wrote with Robin King, plunges into the intricate artistry of its title, detailing an aspiring artist's plunge into both unabashed creativity and piercing madness.

Aisling (Nightingale/The Fall/Legends) Franciosi portrays Ella Blake, whose mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), is a legend in the stop-motion field, but has fallen victim to arthritis and has come to use Ella as an instrument to enact her visions. Suzanne, however, is an unbearable taskmaster, and so when she lands in the hospital from a stroke, Ella seizes the chance to project herself through the technique in a more personal way.

At first, Ella achieves promising strides, but the gamut of her inspiration comes from a mysterious child, played with marked precociousness by Caoilinn Springall, who shows up at her apartment building. The child expresses an interest in Ella's work, offering ideas on how her storytelling might improve, which soon places Ella under the girl's suggestive control. Ella discards her mom's project, using refrigerated meats and dead animals as the filler for her puppets' mortician-wax frameworks, one character being a frightened, woodland child and the other, a monstrous stalker called the Ash Man.

As the animated process enters darker regions, Ella's boyfriend (Tom York) and his sister (Therica Wilson-Read) try to steer her toward a more practical path, including a job at an animation studio, but when Ella discovers her concept has been stolen, the betrayal pushes her over the edge. 

It's at this point that puppet-sprung sequences press the plot, even if the genuine, stop motion is combined with mimicking computerization, including (from what's implied by the credits) disguised/imprinted actors. Whatever the case, the culmination looks credible and creepy. 

I anticipated Stopmotion to enter the Puppet Master/Child's Play realm, perhaps even echoing Richard Matheson's Twilight Zone classic, "The Invaders," and his Trilogy of Terror (Zuni Doll) finale, "Amelia." Though what culminates is still predatory, it more so adheres to Rod Serling's regressive, Twilight Zone fable, "Nightmare as a Child," with Frankenstein allusions that tap Lucky McKee's May, while met by the mental-degeneration of Christopher Wells' The Luring, the transposing terror of John Carpenter's The Ward, the mechanized doom of David Lynch's Eraserhead and the spiraling, maternal suffocation of Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid.   

As a consequence, the film's unhurried progression and tiering nuances may not be everyone's cup of tea, in particular if they're anticipating an all-out, puppets-attack gambol. However, for those who enjoy psychological thrillers and/or alchemistic, puppet animation in general, Stopmotion's twofold strangeness is more than liable to hit a divergent and lasting nerve.