STOPMOTION. The Puppet Master [REVIEW]

The philosopher from Rejs (1970) by Marek Piwowski argued that one cannot be both the creator and the material simultaneously. The main character in Stopmotion would likely disagree with this concept.

Suzanne Blake is a living legend of stop-motion animation, who, facing advancing arthritis, relies on the help of her daughter Ella in producing her next, likely final, film. The relationship between the two women is tense: the domineering mother demands unconditional obedience and availability from her daughter. One day, Suzanne suffers a stroke and falls into a coma, so Ella decides to finish the film on her own in a rented apartment turned studio. Her efforts are observed by a nameless girl from the same building, who finds Suzanne’s film boring and encourages Ella to create an original work based on a story about a girl tormented by a dangerous monster called Popielec. The girl also convinces Ella to use rotten meat and a fox’s carcass to construct new dolls. The notion that every artist places a piece of themselves into their art is brought to life by Ella with macabre literalness.

British filmmaker Robert Morgan studied animation at The Surrey Institute of Art and Design (now University for the Creative Arts). He first gained attention with short films Paranoid (1994) and The Man in the Lower-Left Hand Corner of the Photograph (1997), but his most acclaimed work came with the BAFTA-nominated Bobby Yeah (2011). Morgan cites influences such as the Quay Brothers, Jan Švankmajer, Edgar Allan Poe, Francis Bacon, and David Lynch—and all these influences are evident in his astonishing stop-motion films (the undersigned also notes similarities to the excellent music videos of the band Tool, shot using this labor-intensive method, such as Sober, Prison Sex, and Parabola). Stopmotion is Morgan’s feature-length debut, which he realized with a script co-written with Robin King, funded by a grant of over £900,000 from BFI.

Stopmotion, a blend of live-action and stop-motion animation, is marketed as a horror film, and to some extent, that is true. However, it should be added that Morgan’s film is much closer to psychological horrors like Repulsion (1965) by Roman Polanski and Possession (1981) by Andrzej Żuławski (and somewhat also to body horror in the spirit of David Cronenberg) than to the typical slasher films with psychopathic killers and gallons of blood. The source of terror here is the mental landscape of a young woman descending into madness—an anguished, unfulfilled artist living in the shadow of her famous and domineering mother. “I don’t have my own voice,” notes Ella, while Suzanne explicitly calls her submissive daughter “a puppet tangled in her own strings.” Ella will eventually find her voice and transform into an independent puppet master, but she will pay the highest price for it—like almost every artist who burns themselves out for their art.

Pathological ambition turning into obsession seems to be the main theme of Stopmotion, but other interpretations are possible (e.g., the conflict between the id and the ego, the return of repressed impulses, or post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from implied sexual abuse). The lack of a clear interpretation has led some critics to accuse the film of being overly focused on form at the expense of content. This criticism is misplaced because the form not only does not dominate the content, but is almost identical with it. However, Stopmotion may be too sophisticated for a mainstream audience long subjected to behavioral conditioning to consume products designed primarily for mindless entertainment. Amid the deluge of unwatchable film-like products such as Skinamarink (2022) by Kyle Edward Ball and The Outwaters (2022) by Robbie Banfitch, Morgan’s film stands as a rare case of an intriguing horror that serves purposes other than brainless entertainment with popcorn and beer.