Margot
2007 · 11m · Belgium
Directed by Gerlando Infuso
Genres: animation, fantasy, horror
Margot, a possessive and obsessive woman, murders her lover to spare him the ravages of age, in a dark gothic stop-motion fable where love collapses into destruction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A stop-motion mercy killing wrapped in gothic drag—competent, sure, but it's playing it safe within the 'dark fairy tale' sandbox instead of actually deranging the form.
Infuso's command of stop-motion as a medium for intimate mythology is precise and considered; the formalism of the technique becomes the constraint that forces genuine emotional rigor, situating the work in a lineage of animation that trusts craft over spectacle.
The decision to render obsessive love through the tactile, frame-by-frame deliberation of stop-motion itself—making the viewer complicit in the painstaking construction of destruction—is the filmmaking choice that transforms what could be mere gothic melodrama into something genuinely unsettling and formal.
Reviews
Récompensé à Annecy dès son premier film (« Margot », 2007, Prix du Jury Junior), Gerlando Infuso a poursuivi dans la voie d'un gothique féminin, et peut-être même féministe. L'amour débouche sur la mort et la sensualité sur le malaise.