Critics reviews

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... 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.

In any case, the movie’s rather haphazard plotting and hallucinatory subjectivity doesn’t encourage deep thinking — the kinds of eruptive action Morgan uses in his shorts only musters head-scratching in the larger narrative frame.

It’s been a while since a horror film genuinely succeeded at making me squirm; to look away in fright. It will be hard for any other horror film this year to beat this nightmare... [Stopmotion] makes your skin crawl and that has a lot to do with character designs and the script.

Although it clearly wants to be seen as some kind of wild hallucinatory exploration into the heart of madness, “Stopmotion” eventually reveals itself to be little more than a collection of barf-bag visuals and tired conventions that are occasionally enlivened by some nifty animation and the strong performance from Franciosi.

Stopmotion is not a film that strives to keep secrets or deliver surprises. It wants us to understand what’s happening, at least to an extent, and still be helpless to prevent it... Franciosi is stunning as always, completely absorbed in her character. The film needs this quality of performance, but also benefits from Ben Baird’s superior sound design, more powerful in the dark.

Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature. Like the art form it celebrates, “Stopmotion” is careful, patient and almost punishingly focused, with Franciosi bringing the same intensity that made her role in “The Nightingale” (2019) so devastating.

Stopmotion typically strains to hit the 90-minute mark, and its psychological depths are perhaps a bit shallower than intended, but for those who prefer more tangible images in their horror, it’s a marked success in that regard... Morgan’s film may not set any new definitive baseline in stop motion horror, but it’s a clear step forward for the genre, and one can certainly hope that the technique becomes more widely employed, and soon.

“Stopmotion” demonstrates the difficulty in stretching [Morgan's] singular, fantastical sensibility to suit a full-length project’s storytelling requirements... [The film] arrests attention with its vivid, escalating eruptions of grotesque imagination... [But] masterful as he is at creating the stuff of nightmares, Morgan is much less assured handling the character actions, psychology and dialogue outside his heroine’s fevered psyche.

The stop-motion only occasionally reaches the imaginative heights of Morgan’s gleefully unhinged and grotesque 2011 short Bobby Yeah... Stopmotion attempts to mold [its] instincts into a discernible narrative shape, and as we watch Ella spiral in the way that characters in stories such as this are often prone to, it’s hard not to lament how obvious and conventional that shape turns out to be.

A strong central performance from Aisling Franciosi anchors a narrative which is stretched rather thin in parts, and some genuinely creepy animation also helps power this intriguing British horror.

[Morgan] breaks expectations and medium with his live-action feature debut... Just because [Stopmotion] is a familiar tale, doesn't impact the strength of the retelling... It's chilling and tragic in equal measures.