Parents' Guide to Stopmotion

Gory and hallucinatory, this body horror film isn't afraid to go all-out with its symbolic imagery, its unsettling sound design, and—best of all—its eerie, creepy stop-motion animation. The feature writing and directing debut of Robert Morgan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Robin King, Stopmotion lures viewers in with what seems like a perfectly understandable story. It's about a woman's struggle to express her creativity and get out from under her abusive mother's shadow. And it's about the fear that we might not, at the end of the day, have anything really to say.

But as it goes deeper into its bizarre world, with its parade of unexpected imagery and strange plot turns—along with its intense sound design, which ranges from a muffled effect when Ella is unable to focus to slurping sounds (both relating to a juice box and to bodily fluids)—it becomes much more complicated. This is a movie about making a movie about life, death, birth, blood, bodies, ideas, monsters, and imagination—or perhaps it's just a movie about surviving. By the time Stopmotion reaches its mind-bending conclusion, it's hardly a narrative movie at all, recalling instead such awe-inspiring works of stop-motion animation as The Wolf House or Mad God or even the twisted animations of Czech artist Jan Svankmajer. Stopmotion may not necessarily be memorable for its story or characters, but its images and ideas will haunt viewers.