'Memoir of a Snail' review: A bleak, brilliant, and hilarious rumination on loss

There are a thousand ways you can ruminate on grief and loss on-screen. You can weave it through a topical HBO drama. You can hide it in a Netflix comedy. You can make a mollusk convey it. Or you can choose to gently handle such dark and surreal subject matter through the most tactile and whimsical of forms: stop-motion animation.

This is the dismal, strange, and wondrous path trodden by director, writer, and production designer Adam Elliot in his brilliant film Memoir of a Snail. Having long dwelled in narratives that honor the absurdity of loneliness and misfortune, the Mary and Max director's latest work leans into the nature of loss and adversity through unforgettable characters and exquisite design.

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Despite appearances, this is not is a kids' movie. A funny, strangely sweet, and macabre tale, Memoir of a Snail embraces the surrealism of life's darker side in a bleak but fascinating world. Amid a dismal Australian landscape, we meet Grace Pudel (voiced with gentle charm and surrender by Succession's Sarah Snook) and her twin brother Gilbert (The Power of the Dog's Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose lives take some seriously awful turns, both together and apart.

And as the title suggests, snails play a major role in this film. Pay attention to the snails.

Memoir of a Snail confronts death with frankness.

Credit: BFI London Film Festival

The very first scene of Memoir of a Snail sees the death of Pinky, who issues such a horrifying death rattle that it will be hard to watch (or hear) for anyone who's been present for a similar moment. Voiced by Australian screen legend Jacki Weaver, it's probably one of the most unsettling starts of a film I've seen in an age. We think she's gone, but Pinky suddenly awakens and screams the word "POTATOES!" before leaving us forever. It's at once deeply upsetting and extremely funny, embodying the dual tone of the entire film.

Beginning with Pinky's final wheezes and moving through distressing subject matter, including abandonment, religious extremism, and attempted suicide, Memoir of a Snail is an unrelentingly grim narrative. One of the most harrowing scenes in the film, a brutal conversion therapy sequence, is hard to watch. But the film's best survival tool through it all is Grace herself, with Snook's reserved but frank character declaring herself a glass-half-full type of person, against all odds. The structure of the film follows Grace as she tells her life story to her freed pet snail Sylvia, whose characteristically slow speed means she's in for the whole odyssey, like it or not.

Death, loss, and mischance follow Grace and Gilbert their entire lives, from the untimely deaths of their parents to their separation by child services to either side of the country. These twins ("two souls, one heart") are failed by most everyone in their lives, whether intentionally or not, and seeing them be wrenched apart is heartbreaking. But it's not the end of their misfortune — especially for Gilbert, who is adopted by a family of extreme religious zealots and forced to work in their "Eden" orchard for basically nothing.

Here, the film unpacks the power of childhood imagination and twin connection to survive hardships, with Grace and Gilbert finding (or forcing) joy in even the most dismal of circumstances. In fact, Memoir of a Snail channels a shared despair with another brilliantly animated meditation on grief. When watching, I found it near impossible not to think of Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp's Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Another cozy, stop-motion consideration on grief centred around an adorable, relatable, deeply lost protagonist, it's a film Mashable entertainment editor Kristy Puchko described as "a mindful, willfully silly exploration of loss that had even this hard-shelled critic cracking up and breaking down." This is the exact experience I had with Memoir of a Snail.

Grace narrates these chapters of deep despair with submissive acceptance and a glimmer of hope, all scored with sublime melancholy by famed Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Cantillation choir, and soprano Jane Sheldon. But of course, we need to talk about that cast.

Memoir of a Snail features a dynamite Australian cast.

Credit: BFI London Film Festival

Our introverted protagonist Grace (Snook in a mode as far away from Shiv Roy as you can get) is a sensitive, closed-off, and intensely lonely person who misses her brother and openly declares she shares personality traits with snails. "Snails hibernate when they need to repair themselves," she says, identifying with this tendency. Grace retreats into her shell at any sign of threat, moving ever so slowly through her life. Snails pepper every scene, from Grace's heaving collection of snail paraphernalia to the pattern on her clothing, not to mention physical snails shifting through various moments. And throughout the film, Grace's need to shed such a shell and practice the art of letting go becomes paramount to her journey.

Meanwhile, Gilbert is a confident, suppressed young man whose defiance could be his downfall. Smit-McPhee lends Gilbert a melancholy romanticism, and makes him someone for Grace (and us) to easily root for. Grace and Gilbert are initially voiced by young actors Charlotte Belsey and Mason Litsos, whose childlike curiosity and fragility put the film on a wonderful footing.

Magda Szubanski is frankly terrifying as Ruth, Gilbert's foster mother. Paul Capsis is outrageous as Grace's foster parents, Ian and Narelle (he does both voices). Dominique Pinon (the one non-Australian in the case, known for his work with Jean-Pierre Jeunet) is briefly wonderful as Grace and Gilbert's father Percy, a French street artist and alcoholic. Aussie fave Eric Bana even makes an appearance as James the Magistrate (a small but pivotal role).

Notably, ABC journalist Tony Armstrong is downright hilarious as Grace's love interest Ken, described by Grace as a "Canberra Adonis — a Cadonis." Plus, if you're listening closely, you'll hear music legend Nick Cave as an ill-fated postman called Bill.

Memoir of a Snail is a smorgasbord of detail.

Credit: BFI London Film Festival

From its opening frames bursting with piles of cigarettes, cocktail frankfurts, boxes of snail poison, and random garden gnomes, Memoir of a Snail is packed with details both macabre and marvelous. Completely free of CGI, this stop-motion animation film features around 7,000 objects and 200 sets, all meticulously shot by cinematographer Gerald Thompson and sharply edited by Bill Murphy. Through snail-hoarding protagonist Grace, Elliot explores the emotional weight we bestow upon objects, and the false sense of safety they can convey — and it gives the production team so much to work with.

But it's not all sunshine and rainbows being animated in Memoir of a Snail; it's blood, shit, broken bones, and snail ejaculation. Sound designer David Williams has quite the task on his hands — and boy, does he deliver. In one scene, Gilbert shoves a lost tooth back up into his bloody gum, shot uncomfortably, hilariously close by Thompson, with all the glorious foley we won't forget. There are tits a-swingin' as the film cuts to Grace's foster parents' nude cruises, and there's also a scene of public masturbation. (As I mentioned before, a kids' film this is not.)

Grace details each character's personality and quirks in a rundown worthy of Amélie Poulain herself, with the animation team thriving as they capture each person's signature style. For one, Pinky's wondrous sense of interior design and the depiction of her rambunctious life experiences is a triumph of surrealism.

The film particularly leans on a sense of Australiana in this detail: toast laden with thick smears of Vegemite, rusty old Arnott's Biscuits tins, crisp copies of Women's Weekly, sticky pots of Clag glue, crunchy old Spalding netballs, and a truckload of steaming Chiko rolls. Australians will delight in the porn shops and fireworks shops of Canberra; you'll want to pause each scene just to take it all in.

That this level of delightful detail exists in the grim landscape of Memoir of a Snail is what gets us and its protagonists through its darker moments, and creates the film's signature blend of surrealism, frank realism, and hilarious fucked-upness. At the end of the film, we've really been through it with Grace, and we're better for it, perhaps armed with the courage to shed our own shells — or just keen to go on a nude cruise.

Memoir of a Snail was reviewed out of the BFI London Film Festival. The film will open in Australia on Oct. 17, and in U.S. cinemas in limited release on Oct. 25, with a wider release in November.