Memoir of a Snail (now streaming on AMC+) is a movie for those who thought Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl needed to be 1,000,000 times more depressing. This stop-motion animation endeavor from Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot is quite the impressive display of idiosyncratic visuals, earning a nomination at the 2025 Oscars for Best Animated Picture â itâs also quite a gloomy thing, the very-much-for-adults-only story about a woman to whom scads of awful stuff happens. But hey, at least itâs animated in a highly whimsical style, right? And itâs actually NOT about grief and loss, like every other movie out there â itâs mostly about just death. Death death deaaaaaathhhhh!
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Our protagonist is Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook), like âmud puddle.â Sheâs a sad woman. Her best friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver) has just passed away, and Grace is looking back on her own life, narrating to her pet snail Sylvia â as in Plath â the story of who she is and where she came from and all the miserable things that happened to her. Grace has cared for Sylvia since she was a child, so youâd think Sylvia knows the story already, but then again, sheâs just a snail, and surely wasnât paying attention, although one canât help but ponder if Sylvia is paying attention now. I probably shouldnât get hung up on this, but here I am, getting hung up on this. Better to be hung up on this than fully immersed in the misery fugue that is Graceâs life; thank the deity of your choice this movie is fiction.
OK, Iâm un-hung up now. It began in the womb for Grace. No, really. Cleft palate, premature, mother died in childbirth. At least she has a twin, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and theyâre inseparable, as twins can be, and as children forced by circumstance to huddle together to survive must be. When she nearly bled out during surgery to fix her lip, Gilbert donated his own blood to save her, thinking it would kill him to do so. Sweet kid. They grew up in a cruddy little apartment, but it was home. They read quietly together and Gilbert indulges his pyromania by blowing up massive piles of fireworks as Grace watches wide-eyed; he also heroically fights off her bullies. Their father (Dominique Pinon) was crushed by his wifeâs death, and rendered a paraplegic by a drunk driver, and now sits in his wheelchair drinking, drinking and drinking some more. But heâs kind and loving. And then heâs dead. As the guy wrote, so it goes.
That isnât a spoiler. Thereâs so so much more pain to come. E.g., Grace and Gilbert become wards of the state and are split up; she lands with a childless nudist-swinger couple, and he ends up all the way across the country with a family of Christian zealots who babble their endless prayers in tongues. Extremes! âI never saw him again,â Grace mumbles, but he does write letters to her â note: itâs the 1970s â detailing how the wackos force him to go to church and eat meat against his will and toil in their apple orchard. Grace, meanwhile, begins obsessively collecting snail memorabilia, volunteering at the library and hanging out with the highly eccentric Pinky, who lives life with enough gregariousness to almost balance out Graceâs lonely, sad, depressive, melancholy, pensive, mournful, sorrowful, somber (OK, shutting the Thesaurus now) life. Of which weâre about to experience even more lonely, sad, depressive, melancholy, pensive, mournful, sorrowful, somber things. Hope youâre up for it!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Memoir of a Snail is so maudlin it makes Precious look like Mary Poppins. Aesthetically, itâs Turbo meets Marcel the Shell with Shoes On meets Corpse Bride meets Boxtrolls meets Happiness. OK, I exaggerate â meets not Happiness but, um, Michael Haneke?Â
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Weaver is loony in all the right ways as Pinky, whoâs nutso life deserves a spinoff series.
Memorable Dialogue: Sample voiceover narration: âWe couldnât afford a proper funeral, so Dad was cremated by the government, his ashes put in a cardboard box. I sprinkled him into his jelly bean jar.â
Sex and Skin: A surprising amount â considering how animation is so frequently a family-friendly medium â and, as the phrase so infamously went, âall involving puppets.â
Our Take: Somewhere in Memoir of a Snail is an empathetic portrait of a misfit woman we all can relate to in some way, whether we recognize a part of ourselves in her, or know someone like her. Grace lives in a tiny world on the societal fringe, and doesnât know much beyond the shadow of the black cloud over her head. Sheâs sensitive and meek and smart and well-read and thoughtful and self-aware, but also finds herself trapped in a self-pitying narrative that often begs to be retitled Sad Trombone: The Movie.
Elliot struggles to nail the tone here â aiming for bittersweet black comedy is like landing a B-52 on a postage stamp, and I think he snaps off one of the landing gears in the trying. His visual style is admirably weird, distinctive in its landfill-meets-sad-girl-goth found-item-sculpture aesthetic, all wobbly and uneven in its character design, and perfectly imperfect. Itâs absurdist and surreal, which tames the miserable content â ranging from addiction to shock therapy to sex fetishes and more, much more â with the silliness of the imagery, at least a little bit.
But beyond a couple of Pinkyâs nutty escapades, the film is rarely truly funny. Your response more often will be ha ha⦠ha? Should we be laughing? I for sure wasnât crying, and the hopeful ending feels a tad disingenuous, as if it was tacked on to compensate for the miles of bleak that preceded it. Maybe Iâm a cynic, but the entire thing put me off more than it drew me in.
Our Call: Itâs also a bit too slow. Not a surprise for a movie called Memoir of a Snail. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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