MEMOIR OF A SNAIL - Mark Reviews Movies

Memoir of a Snail, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 24, 2024

The lives of the characters in Memoir of a Snail are filled with tragedy, but the tone of writer/director Adam Elliot's film, presented in stop-motion animation, is probably best summed up by a pair of tombstones. They're for the two husbands of one of the story's central characters, an older woman who—wisely, maybe—seems to have given up on finding another spouse after the first died in an unfortunate dishwasher-loading accident and the second died on the first day of a cross-country tour of Australia. Both men are memorialized at their graves with the usual business, but the wife shows her own good spirits by including puns at the bottom of the headstones.

The whole of this story teeters along the edge of despair. It is a sad film, to be sure, highlighted by the constant grief, hardship, and depression of its main character Grace Pudel (voice of Sarah Snook). She has had a hard time of it since birth, when she was separated prematurely from her twin brother in the womb, was born was a cleft palate, and never really knew her mother, who died when the brother came into the world on schedule. All of this is a lot for one person, and it's just the start of poor Grace's story.

There's more, obviously—death, partings of ways, loneliness, inattention, romantic frustrations and betrayals, death, death, and more death for Grace to endure. It's almost as if Elliot has it out for this character, given how almost every step of her biography features some difficulty for her to confront. Even the few good times of Grace's life are born of or exist as preludes to suffering.

The filmmaker, though, clearly doesn't want all of this to happen to Grace because of anything about her. She's an innocent in this horror show of a life, in which the world around her seems to have been drained of all color, existing along a monochromatic spectrum of the dark hues of Grace's hair and clothes, where the brightest thing might be the character's pale complexion. Elliot's vision of Grace's life is a weird and twisted little world, where the warped joke isn't on poor Grace, who keeps going in spite and because of the terrible things that happen to her, but is funny, simply because the film seems to promise that things will never become too much for her.

Humor is a salve here, as bleak and tactless as some of the jokes may be. We almost have to laugh, in a way, because to take Grace's story, being told to a snail friend she has decided to release into a garden, seriously would be fall into the same sort of misery Grace often feels. Elliot basically tells us it's fine to laugh with the framing device, which repeatedly cuts to the snail crawling its sluggish path toward freedom.

Before the little gastropod is barely a couple feet away from Grace, her narrative has already included the death of one parent, a surgical nightmare, a childhood full of bullying, and, almost inevitably, her becoming an orphan. We kind of feel bad for the snail, too, which just wants to enjoy the outdoors for the first time in its life.

Elliot's animation style helps a lot in this regard, as well. There's nothing particularly realistic about the world or, especially, the characters within it. Grace has big ovals for eyes, which only make the occasional stream of tears more prominent, and her unlikely best friend Pinky (voice of Jacki Weaver), the older woman with an unlucky marital history, describes her own wrinkly face in a way that, while it won't be mentioned here, certainly does make us look at it in a different way. The girl's French father, a former circus performer who's confined to a wheelchair shortly before the births of the twins, keeps a cigar dangling impossibly between his lips, and Grace's slightly younger brother Gilbert (voice of Kodi Smit-McPhee) grows up to have a face that becomes a gradually deepen scowl—for good reason, of course, because it's his life and misery, too.

Narrated by Grace to the departing snail, the story follows the character from birth to young adulthood, as she tries to find the silver linings in everything bad that happens to her. One by one, they seem to be taken away from her, whether that be the father, who dies the night after a grand day out to an amusement park, or Gilbert, who is sent off to a different foster family than Grace. They communicate by letters over the years, as Grace explains how her foster parents are regularly absent swingers (As a child, she imagines they like playground equipment) and Gilbert's fanatically religious foster family makes him a child laborer and brings out more of his rebellious side.

There are bright spots, including Pinky, who serves as the orphan's mentor, and a guy who finally seems to love her, but from an opening scene that reveals the older woman's fate, Elliot lets us know we shouldn't hope for the best, because the worst appears to be unavoidable. Grace does hope, even as she buys—and starts stealing—more and more snail-related and paraphernalia, until her entire life is defined by tragedy and a collection of curios of the shelled creatures.

Beneath the melancholy, the story and style are so eccentric that Memoir of a Snail is genuinely funny in the face of repeated tragedy. It's a quirky but touching little film about moving forward, no matter how slowly and whatever's behind a person.

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