Memoir of a Snail second look review: Adam Elliot’s dark animation finds hope in a downward spiral

Kids do not fly their nest in an Adam Elliot film. They may be pushed out, or their homes may crumble, but his characters do not want to take wing and have no hope of soaring. Among the many animal companions in the Australian animator’s ‘clayographic’ life fables, birds do figure, but at heart they are caged, or their wings broken, or their legs cut off.                          

And their human keepers, Elliot’s very grounded subjects, are equally lumbered. Where other modes of animation can conjure levity, mobility and free-fancy, Elliot’s clay figures bear the weight of their worries. (He calls his modelling style ‘chunky wonky’ and attributes it to a hereditary physiological shake.) An unsparing but not pitiless creator, he likes to pile up his characters’ burdens to see what they can overcome. 

Across three short films, two mid-length films and two features – 249 minutes of screen time – he has tested them with alcoholism, Alzheimer’s, Asperger’s syndrome, asthma, blindness, a brain clot, a cancerous goitre, cerebral palsy, deafness, medical electrocution, emphysema, a lazy eye, a lightning strike, macrocephaly, paraplegia, thalidomide deformity, Tourette’s syndrome and varicose veins, as well as the loss of parents, pets and limbs, plus frequent bullying. His thumbnail triptych Uncle (1996), Cousin (1998) and Brother (1999) profiled a series of singular family oddballs in all their quirks and coping measures. 

The Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet (2003) found a defiant heroism in the persistence of an orphan and Holocaust exile in outer Melbourne. Elliot’s first feature, Mary and Max (2008), entwined the lives of a young Melbourne misfit and an autistic, overweight Brooklyn loner through a stop-start pen-pal relationship, while Ernie Biscuit (2015) dropped a timid Parisian taxidermist in the Australian back of beyond to dust him off.    

Memoir of a Snail reprises many of these themes, with some variations. The setting makes this Elliot’s most purely Australian film since those early shorts, straddling Melbourne, Canberra and Western Australia (with a Parisian flash-back). It’s also Elliot’s most subjective and interior film to date, narrated by its protagonist, though she is flanked by a range of counterparts. 

Grace Prudence Pudel (her name an echo of Mary and Max’s Mary Dinkle, whose eyes “were the colour of muddy puddles”) is a twin who feels the wrench of familial separation from the moment of birth, yanked from the embryonic warmth of her brother Gilbert’s side – though it’s their mother who dies in childbirth, while Gilbert will be Grace’s stoutest defender. He rescues her with an emergency post-op blood transfusion, and in the schoolyard from bullies (an Elliot perennial) who mock her cleft lip. 

Their father, Percy Pudel, was a French stop-motion animator and street magician (as was the father in Brother; Elliot’s own father was an acrobatic clown) who followed their mother to Australia, but a drunk driver put him in a wheelchair, pushing him to the bottle. Sleep apnoea also ensues, leaving the twins to fight a losing game as his night nurses. They are separated and sent to foster families at opposite ends of the country. While Grace is adopted by a couple of genial swingers in Canberra, Gilbert is sentenced to servitude out west with a family of rabid Christian apple farmers, who see the devil in his every passion.  

While the twins’ trials scan like the torments dispensed by Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket, Elliot builds his story with less glee, more a Dickensian taste for life’s gothic pageant: difference abounds, shit falls in buckets, life is unbiddable. There is still deadpan comedy in his parade of eccentrics, but Memoir of a Snail is also surprisingly lachrymose. The Pudels are his droopiest models yet, with wells beneath their heavy eyes just waiting to channel tears – which in Grace’s case do indeed flow. 

Sarah Snook gives her a mellifluous reading that runs from honeyed joy to quivering misery, emotions underscored by Elena Kats-Chernin’s plangent strings and piano as well as Elliot’s occasional overwriting (“My life had become truly pathetic and things had got out of control… lonely, loveless and imprisoned”).                       

Still, the sentiment is Grace’s own. The snail of the title, she’s also a wallflower and a hoarder, piling up trinkets, guinea pigs, romance novels and, yes, snails as a dam against her feelings of loss. Deep into adulthood she still wears a toy snail hat her dad made her, ping-pong ball eyes on wire stalks, and she has much to relate about snails’ habits: pulling together when threatened, but also never retracing their trails. This last point is made by Grace’s final ally and idol, Pinky, a venerable and gung-ho eccentric (delightfully voiced by Jacki Weaver) who has long shed inhibition and boasts a lengthy list of exploits, from sex in a helicopter with John Denver to ping-pong with Fidel Castro. 

Pinky also trails, or perhaps out-runs, a sense of grand guignol calamity: a name gained by losing a finger in a ceiling fan while dancing on a bar; two husbands lost to bloody mishap; more road accident near-misses as we watch. Yet on she rolls, as symbolised by her blithe talent for hitting crazy golf holes-in-one off every obstruction in her back yard.             

Pinky also seems to have encountered the Uncle of Elliot’s first short, as she relates to Grace his koan of wisdom (by way of Søren Kierkegaard): “Life can only be understood backwards, but has to be lived forwards.” Grace has made a cage of her self-pity, and it’s only with Pinky’s death – the film’s bracketing device – and Grace’s final desolation that she is forced to find her own agency. She tells her story to her favourite snail, Sylvia (named after Plath), as she releases it into her friend’s vegetable garden, marked as ‘Pinky’s pity pit’. Like Harvie Krumpet, she decides she has more living to do.                                         

How Grace moves forward with her life – what warts and wrinkles await her – we do not learn. She may not fly with rock stars but she has shed her shell. In another autobiographical twist, Elliot has her pick up her father Percy’s interest in stop-motion animation. She may not have fallen far from the tree; her past, like Elliot’s marvellously detailed, weighty modelling of it, may define and confine her; but her future floats, unwritten. 

► Memoir of a Snail is available in UK cinemas from 14 February 2025.