I saw a trailer for this movie on TikTok a while ago, and when I saw stop motion animation and normal footage existing in the same frame, I was freaking out. I didn't really know how that works or how someone achieved this, but I knew I had to watch it regardless of how good it ended up being. The story is partly experimental, but it follows a stop motion animator who is determined to finish her mother's work of a stop motion movie, but the young animator is visited by a child who gives her a good idea for a disturbing animation. Soon the animator becomes obsessed with making this film, despite the little girl asking for more and more gross things to make the characters out of, and soon she becomes completely entranced in the creation of this animation. I will say, this movie had a lot of cool moments, but the lack of development and a rushed story ruined the 'film' aspect of this concept. I absolutely loved the stop motion in this movie, and it was really unsettling and creepy since some of the characters were made out of dead roadkill and butchers wax. The hallucination sequence, while a little short, had some insane visual effects of stop motion creatures and puppets appearing on walls and moving in stop motion while the people around move normally. One of the best effects in the movie was when a woman walked in stop motion while the main character was hallucinating, and seeing a human being move in stop motion was extremely unsettling and really cool at the same time! I will say, that's about all this movie has going for it. Apart from the cool stop motion visuals, the story was extremely rushed, especially the development of the main animator. I did understand the experimental part of the film, which was the side plot of the stop motion movie and what was happening in the 'stop motion world' if you will, but it didn't blend well towards the end due to how rushed it was. The whole point of the movie was the stop motion movie and the animator's perception of reality become combined, and while they stuck with this theme pretty well throughout the movie, towards the end they completely forgot about this and rushed straight to a more 'symbolic' ending, which was kind of cool but didn't fit with the movie. I feel like most of the appeal to watch this would be the cool effects with the stop motion characters and seeing them blend into real life situations, but the story of the main animator was not great and that made the 'scary' aspect kind of lost to me. I was only disturbed, not scared, and that was during the one 'graphic' sequence of the film where the animator has truly lost it and ripped her leg stitches to 'put a piece of herself in the film' (which meant a dangling piece of flesh ripped from her leg). Overall, this was a cool movie to watch, but don't expect a good story or scares.
