Stopmotion.

Robert Morgan's Stopmotion follows the hallowed tradition of films like Inland Empire, Berberian Sound Studio and Censor by having an artist's focus on a particular element of cinema open a monstrous portal into madness. And indeed, Stopmotion takes advantage of its titular medium's tendency towards gross morbidity; the animated sequences are queasily unpleasant at times to watch, but that's what makes them all the more effective.

As this board's resident Aisling Franciosi obsessive devotee, I was quite excited to see her latest offering. As a horror lead, Franciosi made her bones with her sublime work in The Nightingale (and to a lesser extent, last year's Last Voyage of the Demeter). Here she is tasked with anchoring the movie almost entirely on her own, portraying the put-upon daughter of a stopmotion icon (the excellent Stella Gonet, who is making quite an impression on me lately with her turns in Spencer and especially El Conde), who is forced to assist her mother in the creation of a long-gestating project when her mother is laid low by a stroke. While Franciosi tries to tinker with the work after her mother's incapacitation, a strange child (newcomer Caoilinn Springall, unsettlingly good) wanders into her orbit to tell Aisling to abandon her mother's work and tell a different story, a darker story that evokes our deepest fears as a child. And as expected, Franciosi begins to find herself drawn into this new project and the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred with blood and clay.

Narratively, Stopmotion doesn't really hit any unexpected beats, but the craft behind it is in full and gruesome display and the performances are impressive. "Great artists always put themselves into their work," one character tells another, and even with this film's flaws, there is indeed a rich artistry here. But it may require a bit of an iron stomach to get through it.