‘Memoir of a Snail’ Review: Escaping the Spiral

First things first: “Memoir of a Snail” is not, in fact, the memoir of a snail. It is the memoir of an Australian woman named Grace Pudel (pronounced “Puddle”), who loves snails very much. Grace is voiced by Sarah Snook and rendered in slightly lumpy clay by Adam Elliot, who wrote, directed and produced this stop-motion animation film. It is a weirdly affecting tragicomedy, full of Dickensian turns and eccentric figures. (It is also, lest you be confused by the whimsy, definitely not for children.)

We meet Grace, who wears a knit cap sporting two little eyeballs on the ends of stalks, by the bedside of a wiry-headed woman who’s moaning and groaning toward death. The woman is named Pinky (Jacki Weaver), and within moments, she has actually given up the ghost. Soon after, Grace brings Pinky’s ashes outside to the garden, after which she sits on a bench and sets a jar full of snails free. One of them, Sylvia, has always been Grace’s favorite.

But snails move slowly, and so Grace has the time to tell Sylvia her life story as the skeptical snail inches away at the appropriately named pace. This life story, too, is full of death: Grace’s mother, a malacologist and lover of snails, dies giving birth to Grace and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Their father, a French juggler, becomes an alcoholic, and eventually he dies too. Grace and Gilbert are split up and sent to equally bizarre foster families — her to a negligent but nice-enough couple in Canberra who spend their weekends at key parties, and him to a cruel family of cultlike religious apple farmers in Western Australia.

Tremendous numbers of bad things happen to Grace as she moves into puberty, then adulthood. She shrinks slowly into herself over her lifetime, which includes becoming a hoarder, marrying a horrible man and, blessedly, meeting Pinky, a strange older woman who becomes her friend and mentor. With every blow, Grace recedes into her home a little more, which she fills with small snails on every shelf, because they make her feel safe. But in recounting the stories of woe to Sylvia the snail, Grace always seems upbeat.

Elliot’s style of animation feels a bit like what Tim Burton would have gone for in his own animated films, if his style were far more deranged and grimy and possessed by the spirit of Edward Gorey. It’s also, at times, sexual and violent and somewhat explicit (and, at one point, vaguely weird about weight). His animated figures are people with desires and terrors, some quite twisted. They are haunted. They can be gross.