One of 2024’s most polarizing horror movies, Stopmotion, has finally arrived at its streaming home, so audiences around the world can enjoy this terrifying viewing experience and make up their own minds. 2024 has been a year of divisive horror. Lisa Frankenstein and Under Paris have been met with mixed reviews. Imaginary and Night Swim were both widely panned by critics, but did quite well at the box office. Abigail was well-received by critics, but it performed poorly at the box office. Immaculate and The First Omen have both received positive reviews and a warm welcome at the box office.

Stopmotion was even more polarizing than all of them. It has an impressive critics’ score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating near-universal acclaim from reviewers, but it’s been met with a much harsher audience score of 50%. It’s rare that there’s such a large disparity between the critics’ score and the audience score. Stopmotion’s critics’ score is on the high end of the “fresh” spectrum, but the audience score is wallowing below the “rotten” threshold. And now, the movie is available for viewing at home, as it’s arrived on streaming.

Stopmotion Is Now Streaming On Shudder

This grotesque horror gem is available to watch on Shudder

Stopmotion had its world premiere at the 2023 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, on September 24 last year. It was later screened at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival on October 7. The movie got a theatrical release in select theaters across the U.S. on February 23, 2024, courtesy of IFC Films, and now, it’s finally found a home in the streaming space on Shudder. Along with such horror gems as When Evil Lurks and It’s a Wonderful Knife, the surprisingly divisive Stopmotion is now available for streaming on Shudder.

A combination of live-action and animation, Stopmotion was directed by Robert Morgan in his feature-length directorial debut. It stars Aisling Franciosi as the daughter of an arthritic stop-motion animator trying to help her mother finish her latest film. When her mom suffers a stroke and falls into a coma, the daughter resolves to complete the movie on her own. As she continues to work on the animation, she becomes consumed with this grotesque world of her own creation and begins to lose her mind.

Why Stopmotion’s Audience Score Is So Low

How come audiences don’t like Stopmotion as much as critics?

While critics have given Stopmotion near-universally positive reviews, the audience reception is split right down the middle. Half the Rotten Tomatoes users who watched the film loved it, but the other half hated it. Franciosi’s powerful lead performance has been praised across the board, but Morgan’s approach to the filmmaking has been much more polarizing. Some have seen him as a visionary genius with a strong command of disturbing, Lynchian cinematography, while others have dismissed Stopmotion as a classic example of style over substance. It looks great, but ultimately has little to say.

The negative responses have criticized the movie for offering little more than a procession of stomach-turning visuals and trite horror clichés. It’s common for a movie or TV show with unnerving themes and images to polarize audiences. Even if those disturbing visuals are well-composed and serve a poignant story, there are some viewers who can’t overlook their disgusted response. Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s The Curse polarized audiences for the same exact reason: it was just too weird for some viewers.

Stopmotion Takes The Notion Of The Tortured Artist To The Extreme

Ella Blake makes Jack Torrance look like an amateur

Stopmotion’s detractors may have criticized the film for adding little to the canon of horror movies about characters losing their minds in isolation, but it does have its own unique angle. It takes the concept of the tortured artist to its unsettling extreme. The character of Ella Blake is an artist who becomes so consumed by her art – and so isolated by the creative process – that she loses her grip on reality. Franciosi was the perfect casting choice for this role, having brought a similar intensity to her acclaimed lead performance in The Nightingale.

It might follow the same familiar beats of movies like The Shining, but where The Shining focuses more on the isolation of the artistic process as the catalyst for Jack Torrance’s madness, Stopmotion focuses on the artistic process itself as the catalyst for Ella’s madness. It’s a macabre exploration of just how far an artist will go to perfect their art, and whether or not those painstaking efforts are even worth it. And the use of animation as the artist’s chosen medium paves the way for some gonzo visuals.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes