Stopmotion

Suzanne Blake, a renowned stop-motion filmmaker, pressures her daughter Ella to complete her latest project because Suzanne's arthritis has left her unable to work. The arrangement is fraught as Suzanne's demanding style borders on abuse, forcing Ella to work through exhaustion. Ella agrees, hoping to honor her mother's legacy.

Suzanne suffers a stroke and falls into a coma, leaving Ella to confront the project alone. The studio's collapse and Suzanne's condition push Ella to reconsider her limits and push forward. The impulse to finish the film on her own becomes her central driving force.

With no immediate help from Suzanne, Ella relocates to a semi-abandoned apartment building managed by her boyfriend Tom to keep working. She sets up a makeshift workspace and distances herself from the original project to pursue a new direction. The isolation deepens her fixation on the film and its creation.

A curious young girl living in the same building intervenes, declaring the original story boring and introducing a new idea about a girl lost in the woods. Ella abandons the initial project and begins to bring the girl's vision to life. The narrative focus shifts dramatically as the girl becomes a collaborator in the film oddly resisting conventional storytelling.

The girl returns to push for more realism, insisting the figures must look real. She suggests using spoiled steak to emulate flesh, and Ella reluctantly agrees to try this radical material. The choice foreshadows the film's increasingly disturbing production methods.

The girl envisions the Ash Man, pushing Ella to sculpt it from something dead. They venture into the forest to find a suitable source—eventually discovering a dead fox. Ella resists using such materials, causing the girl to withhold the rest of the story.

Desperate for inspiration, Ella attends a party where Polly gives her LSD. She remakes the Ash Man puppet using the fox carcass and then hallucinates the creature peering through her peephole. Tom wakes her, and he claims the vision was only a hallucination, while the drugs remain in her pocket.

Polly, a fellow stop-motion animator, sets Ella up at the studio only to reveal that she will be crafting eyeballs for the figures. Ella discovers Polly has plagiarised her film, leading to a confrontation in which she destroys Polly's set. The betrayal intensifies Ella's isolation and rage.

The little girl resumes telling the tale, insisting the Ash Man returns on the second night and touches the girl. Ella refuses to include this development, claiming the girl escapes. The story's darker elements persist, foreshadowing the climax.

After another hallucination involving the Ash Man, Ella wakes up in hospital with an injured leg. Tom visits and warns that the project has gone too far, even planning to destroy and delete the footage, but Ella insists on handling it herself; she learns that her mother has died, deepening her grief. The personal losses compound her fixation on finishing the film.

Returning to the apartment, Ella strangles the girl to death, only for the girl to reappear unharmed. In a frenzy, Ella kills Polly and Tom, then harvests their flesh to create life-sized figures of the girl and the Ash Man. The violent act marks a complete takeover of Ella's psyche by the film's grotesque vision.

The lifelike Ash Man, crafted from flesh, stalks toward Ella and the girl. The girl protests that this isn't part of the story, but Ella seems to embrace the horror as she unites with the Ash Man. Inside a forest cabin, the girl watches Ella bleed to death on screen, then Ella steps into a satin-lined box, signaling a dark, ritual ending.