Stopmotion

IT was American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson that once said, “the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night.”

This pretty much sums up the premise of director Robert Morgan’s disturbing psychological horror about a stop-motion animator who struggles to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother.

Now streaming on Shudder, Stopmotion is one of the most perverse, discommoding, downright bizarre and truly unforgettable films I have seen in a long time. The stuff of nightmares and/or high art, Morgan’s debut feature is as unorthodox as it is original and ghastly with it.

Fantastical night terrors meets snuff movie, the film tells the story of Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a stop-motion animator living under the thumb of her exacting mother (Stella Gonet), a famous animator whose hands are failing due to arthritis.

When not kowtowing to her conceited mother in the studio, Ella is caring for her every other need from cutting her food and putting up with her continuous insults. She feels in life, just like the marionettes they work with on screen, a glorified puppet that has no influence and every action and decision carried out for her by others.

When Ella’s mother has a stroke she decides it is time to strike out on her own. But without a guiding hand, this insecure young woman becomes lost, totally adrift in a tumultuous current of unfulfilled individuality and emotional instability.

Stopmotion is gruesome in places. For all its artful lighting and stilted beauty, viewers will be quickly caught off guard by the depths of depravity and violence that Morgan subjects us to. I was left squirming at some of the more visceral and baroque scenes, which boil over with debased hints of Francis Bacon and David Lynch.

(4/5)

Perpetrator

DIRECTED by Jennifer Reeder, Perpetrator, which is new to Shudder, is a supernatural thriller that is deliciously unconventional and downright surreal.

Taking on the feel and style of the work of cinematic masters David Lynch and Dario Argento, it tells the story of Jonquin ‘Jonny’ Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan), a reckless teen sent to live with her estranged aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone).

Brimmimg over with black humour and an eccentric plot that is as gruesome as it is off-the-wall, it sees our young leading lady experience a radical metamorphosis on her 18th birthday that redefines her called “forevering”.

With a new heightened sense of super empathy, Jonny taps into the pain and hurting of those around her to the point  that she can shape-shift into their faces.

When several teen girls go missing at her new school, she goes after the perpetrator using her new super powers.

A feral teenage lesbian horror noir, Perpetrator is weird, wacky, and very entertaining. A film that comes across like an existential study on puberty and women’s place in society, it combines elements of movies such as Mulholland Drive, Clueless, Existenz, and Donnie Darko.

Alicia Silverstone is a joy in the role of the witchy and sophisticated aunt. She brings an element of high camp and decadence to proceedings that is hard to resist.

There’s a gleam in Silverstone’s eye throughout, clearly loving every minute of hamming it up as the tantalising Panto-esque matron in every scene. “I’ve been buried alive twice,” she divulges with contorted zeal at one point.

But there’s plenty of other twisted oddballs in Reeder’s trippy thriller to eat up with relish. The plastic-surgery obsessed nurse and the over-enthusiastic school principal who always expects the worst, who exuberantly drills his students on how to survive a school shooter situation by bursting into classrooms with his water gun, give proceedings a ludicrous nightmarish quality.

Overall, you’ll either love it or hate it, but there’s no denying its whipsmart allure.

(4/5)

Fever Dream

DIRECTED by Claudia Llosa, ‘Fever Dream‘ is a beautiful, rather woozy and intense film about about two mothers and their contrasting relationships with their children.

New to Netflix, Llosa’s film is a poetic, punch-drunk psychological drama that seems as though it were ripped from every parent’s worst nightmares, and then nursed to infinite hysteria by David Lynch or Darren Aronofsky. We are cast under a very strong spell from the off in this deeply perplexing and sensual film.

‘Fever Dream‘, is just that, we are filled throughout with the sense of waking from broken sleep — disorientated, flushed, ill at ease, ruffled, and reaching for something to steer us back towards home and all we hold dear.

Set in rural Argentina, the story revolves around an encounter between two very different women and mothers.

The well-to-do and conservative Amanda (María Valverde), has come from Spain for the summer with her easy-going young daughter Nina (Guillermina Sorribes Liotta), while her husband Marco (Guillermo Pfening), preoccupied with his work, fails to make another family holiday. Amanda is constantly uptight, worrying about her daughter and considering the “rescue distance” of every perceived calamity.

Soon after arriving, Amanda strikes up a relationship with free-spirited local beauty Carola (Dolores Fonzi), a woman who feels trapped in her small town surroundings and unhappy marriage, and longs for something more. Carola also believes that her son David (Emilio Vodanovich) is no longer her son. She claims that during a childhood illness his soul migrated from his body and left someone, or something else, behind in its place.

The film kind of feels like ‘Mulholland Drive‘ had it been set in the deep, dark outreaches of South America.

While beautiful to look at, it is bit of a puzzle, so it won’t be to everyone’s liking. Overall though, ‘Fever Dream’ is a spellbinding film that is as much a study of maternal love, as it is about man’s destruction of Mother Earth.

(3/5)