Reflective Encounters

“The English rural landscape is the fertile setting for this stop-motion animation, which takes a day in the country into rather more chilling territory. As a brother and sister arrive at the site of a picnic, cotton wool clouds float in the distance and the sky hangs above in a neutral blue. But as the perfect scenery lilts them into something like a dream, the film veers into the realm of Picnic at Hanging Rock. With a control of tone that veers with ease from comic to poignant to artfully mysterious, Stones draws a short but substantial line between the countryside and its history in British Horror. 

Animator Joseph Brett uses unnerving, rigid front-on framing to flatten his creations, their haunting faces void of expression. Throughout, Andrew Leung and Bec Boey (who also wrote the film) bring soul to their characters with lively vocal performances. Stones presents the countryside, with its expansive meadows and brambly footpaths, as a site of extra-normal magnetism. You can go half-way around the world, and this place will still be waiting for you, as pristine as you left it. Only now you might be different, and all together lost.”

— Ben Flanagan