Clay weepy Memoir Of A Snail crawls through a gauntlet of misery

There is a light at the end of writer-director Adam Elliot’s claymation tunnel, though it’s a cold and artificial respite from its lifelong suffering. Though Elliot’s sadsack bookworms persist through their hardships, Memoir Of A Snail piles on the pain. By the time its Series Of Unfortunate Events finally relents, depression, poverty, and bad luck have almost taken on the morbid-comic air of Lemony Snicket’s adolescent flagellations. Though crafted with wry care and a captivatingly scuzzy aesthetic, the bittersweet biography is so miserable that the “sweet” ends up as a cloying chaser to old escargot.

Though Grace (Sarah Snook, who gamely narrates most of the film) is merely obsessed with snails—collecting both the creatures themselves and any knickknacks, clothing, or dishware emblazoned with them—she does move through the world so slowly as to seem stuck in place. As she recounts her life to her pet Sylvia (named for Plath; The Bell Jar and crippling melancholy both make an appearance), Grace documents the relentless beating doled out by the universe.

Befitting the gray-brown clothes, bagged eyes, and licorice hair of its figures, Memoir Of A Snail unfurls the spiraling tale of two orphans persevering on Australia’s fringes. Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lost their mother during birth, and their alcoholic father during their hardscrabble childhood. The pair are divided up by social services, Grace sent to one side of the continent, Gilbert to the other. There, they weather foster families either promiscuous or puritanical—swingers or zealots. Either case means easy punchlines (with plenty of full-frontal, stop-motion nudity) when childrearing takes a backseat.

The woebegone children have their aspirations slowly snuffed. Grace’s artistic dreams (of animation, of course) are punctured by her isolated existence; Gilbert’s pyrophilia is smothered by religious extremism. The absurd intensity of their new families attempts to counterbalance the morose story, trying to coax the same kind of wavering smiles that barely keep its characters from bursting into tears. But, though the dry comic relief is at least visually amusing—the surreal adventures of Grace’s elderly friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver, excellent and energetic) are the main standout, as she puffs cigars and twirls her tasseled pasties—these moments are only jarring speed bumps on an angsty Autobahn.

As its morose goths survive Memoir Of A Snail’s pat story, with a similarly pat moral—it’s all a bit storybook, considering this is a film with sex parties, fat fetishists, and electroshock torture—its tired old jokes never match the heightened hellscape of its scripted sadness. Familiar lines like “Dad used to say that childhood was like being drunk. Everyone remembers what you did except you,” can’t compete with the imaginatively cruel gauntlet these Burton-esque kids get put through. 

As in so many claymation films though, Memoir Of A Snail’s charming details and painstaking animation almost render the narrative moot. Elliot’s derelict world—with its flickering plasticky flames, constant curls, and evocative figures, nearly always center-frame—comes perfectly shadowed and entirely engrossing. It’s why even its over-the-top emotions threaten to overwhelm; the handmade setting and its dingy palette is alive, moving with the organic ooze of junkyard slime. It’s a wonder, even if it’s hard to bear. In fact, the writing can be so alienating that it’s ironically easier to let your mind and eye wander to the outskirts of Elliot’s well-appointed frames.

Memoir Of A Snail is a clay weepy, a grief-stricken fable about coming out of your shell despite all the evidence against it, whose brutality overwhelms its silly and sappy asides. But those gluttonous enough for its emotional punishment, or those die-hard devotees to the too-rare craft of physical animation, may find the silver lining to this torrential rain cloud.

Director: Adam Elliot
Writer: Adam Elliot
Starring: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Tony Armstrong, Nick Cave, Jacki Weaver
Release Date: October 25, 2024