Life imitates art when an obsessed stop motion animator fears she is being stalked by her grotesque sculptures. 

I’ll always enjoy a movie involving the worlds of art and industry. Art about art and its obsessive practitioners. Art that comes to life and destroys its creator. 

Ella is an aspiring artist and apprentice to her ailing mother, a legendary, yet over-bearing stop motion animator. She longs to contribute creatively under her mother’s stern control, but her input is met with resentment. 

When her mother is suddenly hospitalized, Ella grapples with her mental health and begins work on her own stop motion picture, until a precocious young girl from her building nudges her way into Ella’s production and proposes a far more terrifying narrative. 

STOPMOTION (2024) is part-live action, part-animation. It’s quiet, slowly paced and filled with dread. Ella’s delirious struggle to control her demons is impossible since she is ultimately the director of her own fate. Her squelching, macabre sculptures are fashioned from a rotting fox, and later, even more troubling mediums with nightmarish consequences. 

Again, another horror movie about a woman verging on a nervous breakdown due to her trauma – we’ve seen it before. But STOPMOTION stands out due to imaginative subject matter, good writing, and the squirm-inducing violence. Not for the squeamish, this one made me nauseous.