Memoir of a Snail review – Adam Elliot's stop-motion animation is brilliantly bleak

The Guardian

15-02-2025

Mention stop-motion animation and the first thing that comes to mind is likely to be the amiable claymation creations of Bristol's Aardman studio. But in fact, perhaps more than any other form of animation, stop-motion is a medium that lends itself to darker, more violent themes: the macabre sentient tendrils of Jan Svankmajer's Little Otik; the haunted gothic fairytales dreamed up in the imagination of Tim Burton; the chilling pre-teen horror of Coraline. Add to this list the singular vision of Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot (Mary and Max, the Oscar-winning short Harvie Krumpet), whose tragicomic tales of loneliness, eccentricity and outsider status are told in a glum colour palette that evokes black mould, peeling wallpaper and crushed dreams.
Elliot's latest, the multi-award-winning, Oscar-nominated Memoir of a Snail, is archetypal Elliot. The sorry tale of a melancholic woman named Grace Pudel (voiced with world-weary resignation by Succession's Sarah Snook), the film is a catalogue of misfortune. Grace's mother dies in childbirth; she and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are orphaned when their depressive, alcoholic father succumbs to his sleep apnoea. And then things get really bad. Grace, like the pet snails she counts among her closest friends, just wants to crawl into her shell and hide from the world.
It's bleak, certainly. But what makes this a distinctively Elliot film is not the relentless misfortune but the flashes of mordant humour to be found alongside Grace's hoarded knick-knacks, and the care with which the director handles his damaged, cherished social outcasts.
In UK and Irish cinemas