The idea of horror lies in the belief in the process. Brilliant horrors like “The Wailing,” “The Ritual,” and “The Witch” all have one thing in common: the sense of the atmosphere that will potentially introduce the horror to the audience. “Stopmotion,” directed by Robert Morgan and produced by the British Film Institute, is a 2023 horror thriller film that initially has the potential to be extraordinary in its genre. The execution, though, is a bit flawed in nature. The film could have been much longer as there remains a lot of space for the characters to grow. Nevertheless, the film is genuinely a good watch with lots of significant themes and some meaningful messages.
Spoilers Ahead
Stopmotion (2023) Plot Summary and Movie Synopsis
The film starts with an animation of a black egg-like thing that awaits to crack. There is tension on the rise as we get the feeling that it is not long until the shell finally breaks. Later, we see Ella Blake helping her mother, Suzanne Blake in clicking the frames of her mother’s stop motion film. Suzanne is a patient with arthritis, and her hands are getting worse with each passing day. Suzanne Blake is considered a legend in the field of stop-motion filmmaking. Her works have been the subject of study in this field, and now she is about to make her last film.
However, due to her illness, Ella needs to be her hands. But Ella seems to be very nervous while working in front of her. Suzanne is very meticulous with the movements of her characters as she notices every millimeter from behind Ella. She scolds Ella every time she makes a mistake. Finally, one day, Ella says that she has her own ideas that they can implement. However, when Suzanne asks directly about her ideas, Ella looks blank. She fails to utter a single word, and she goes back to fixing the armature to click the perfect frame for Suzanne.
How does Ella meet with the Little Girl?
One night, while Ella comes back from her date and sits with the movie, Suzanne has a stroke. Later, Ella stays with her boyfriend, Tom, in his apartment so that she does not have to go back to her mother’s house. However, soon, Ella decides to complete the film as she feels some kind of anxiety. Therefore, Tom decides to rent a room where she can start working on her project. Inside the building, Ella meets with a little girl who, at first, seems a bit annoying. However, soon, they start bonding with each other.
The little girl shows interest in what Ella is doing, and she is eager to hear the story of her film. However, knowing how the story ends, the little girl says it seems a bit boring to her. So, she tells her own story of a little girl who finds herself inside a forest. Soon after, the little girl in the story meets with ‘the Ash Man.’ The little girl runs away from him to save herself. Ella does not show much interest in the story and asks her to leave. Later that night, Ella destroys the whole set her mother built and creates a fresh set to place the story the little girl just told her previously.
What does the Little Girl Convince Ella to do?
When Ella shows the little girl that she has derived the idea of her story to create her own film, she is very impressed. However, moments after, a shade of disappointment fills her eyes. When Ella asks what she does not like this time, the little girl says that the doll that represents the girl in the woods does not look real enough. So, she goes into the kitchen, brings a steak, and asks Ella to put the meat under the doll’s skin. Ella agrees to try it out and finds that the doll actually looks a lot more lifelike than before.
As time progresses, Ella creates a figurine of the Ash Man. But the little girl does not like it either. She says that it must be fashioned from something dead. She even leads Ella to a fox carcass for inspiration, although Ella refuses to comply. Consequently, the little girl refuses to give further details of the story as Ella thinks that if she can create her own film, she can make a story of her own. However, it is only later that she finds out that she is not creatively blessed when it comes to zeroing in on a new idea or story. This results in the uncertainty of how her film is going to end.
What does Polly do to Ella?
Seeing that Ella is in a tough spot, Tom offers his helping hands. But, right now, Ella is more distressed than she ever was before. She does not know what to do next with her story and her characters, which results in distance between the couple. One night, Ella asks Tom’s sister, Polly, for some LSD so that she can evoke new ideas inside her head. That night, she hallucinates seeing the Ash Man staring at her through the peephole of her door. Later, Tom finds her unconscious in her apartment, and he learns that Ella never even touched the LSD. Soon Ella realizes she only had imagined the Ash Man approaching the girl’s door in her dreams.
Seeing her in such a condition, Tom decides Ella needs to throw away all her work right now. He asks his sister Polly to give her a job in her studio to take her mind off of things. Polly, who is also a stop motion artist, helps Ella get a job at her studio. Ella thinks she’s hired as an animator, but she discovers she’s actually tasked with making eyeballs for the figurines. Later, she learns Polly has stolen her film idea of the little girl in the woods and destroyed the set Polly created. She leaves the studio immediately and comes back to the room to finish her film.
Stopmotion (2023) Movie Ending Explained:
What does Ella do to Tom and Polly?
Ella, feeling desperate, decides to reconstruct the Ash Man figurine using the fox carcass. The girl then reveals that in the story, the Ash Man touches her the second night, but Ella refuses to include this. Previously, she had little interaction with her mother, who told her that Ella could not do anything by herself. She has always been the puppet to someone else, and she will always be like that. To prove her wrong, and especially to prove her worth to herself, Ella changes the plot, opting instead for the girl’s successful escape.
After another hallucination of the Ash Man chasing her, Ella wakes up in the hospital with a leg injury. Tom visits her, expressing concern that her project has gone too far and plans to dismantle the set in her apartment. However, Ella insists on doing it herself, with Tom agreeing to help her do that. Ella also comes to know about her mother’s demise, which leaves her in comfort, perhaps. Her mother has always dominated her throughout her whole life. Now she feels like she is free from the shackles, and whatever she does, there is no one to judge.
Before Tom could bring her to the apartment, the little girl already helps Ella to come there. Ella strangles the little girl to death, only to find her standing next to her. Ella cries, knowing that she cannot escape her fate or the little girl, so she must play along. The little girl demands a bloodier remake of the Ash Man as, to her, the meat has somehow lost its warmth since a couple of days have passed. To fulfill the little girl’s want, Ella removes stitches from her leg, extracting a strip of her own muscle.
Tom and Polly discover her doing this bizarre thing and then attempt to take her back to the hospital, but Ella somehow manages to free herself from them. She pushes Tom, who falls down the stairs and kills Polly with the tripod. Later, she kills Tom, who is struggling down the stairs, only to use their flesh so that she can create life-sized figures of the little girl in the woods and the Ash Man. Right after that, Ella struggles to even stand on her feet and asks the little girl whether it is alright to shoot the film.
Is Ella Dead or Alive?
When the figurines are standing facing each other, the Ash Man suddenly turns to Ella and approaches her. Ella sees the little girl panicking as she tells her this is not part of her story. Despite her fear, Ella lets the Ash Man attack her, allowing him to consume parts of her face. Right then, we see the egg-like structure finally break off, and it is bleeding. This suggests that as an artist, Ella is pushed to her limits, and the timing is never right. She is required to learn a lot while making a lot of mistakes. Without mistakes, there can not be any perfection, and in art, there is no perfection.
Ella’s mother has pushed her so much, believing that Ella can be extraordinary like her own mother. But that should not always be the case. Ella could have beaten her in the field if given proper care and time. However, the continuous pressure creates a void inside her head that gives birth to a little girl and the story of Ella, who fears the Ash Man. Yes. Ella is definitely the little girl inside the cabin who fears the unknown that resides outside in the woods. We see Ella removing the mortician’s wax from her face and offering it to the Ash Man. This signifies Ella’s submission to fear.
At the end of the film, we see Ella enter into a cabin resembling the one from her film. She finds the little girl watching footage of Ella bleeding in her apartment. The little girl shows a sign of satisfaction after watching the film, and Ella smiles before entering a satin-lined box and closing the lid. The little girl represents Ella’s mother, who is using Ella as a puppet. Ella, being so very much absorbed by her mother’s presence around her, even when she is in the hospital, creates an imaginary girl to guide her.
Well, this is how Ella’s life ends: by making a film of her mother’s (the little girl’s) choice, bringing havoc upon herself, destroying the few good things (Tom and her relationship with him) she has managed to gather, and finally, giving away her own life in order to make someone else happy. Ellas are real, Suzannes too, it’s just hard to find a way to help them in this vast landscape of human urge to be the best, no matter what the cost is.
