Memoir of a Snail Review
Quite a way into Memoir of a Snail, our woebegone heroine Grace (Sarah Snook) announces to the pet snail she’s been telling her life story, “And then things got even worse!” That sentence is so uniformly true through so much of the movie, it could have been an alternate title.
Grace’s mother died giving birth to her and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Grace has a cleft lip that gets her ruthlessly bullied in school – Gilbert is the only one that will stand up for her, and her only real friend. Then their father dies of sleep apnoea, and the two are sent to separate foster homes on opposite sides of Australia: Grace with a pair of self-help obsessed swingers, Gilbert with an uncaring cult family who run an apple orchard and treat him brutally. By this point, we’re less than half an hour into the film, and there is indeed far, far worse to come.
Memoir of a Snail is the second feature from Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot, coming a full sixteen years after his first, Mary and Max. While the narrative is relentlessly miserable, there’s a lot of offbeat, often macabre humour to be found in the details of Elliot’s tactile stop-motion world: Grace’s enormous and eclectic snail collection, Gilbert’s magic tricks, the whirlwind tour through the amazing life of Grace’s geriatric pal Pinky, the self-help swingers with far too many teeth. Every frame is crammed with detail that makes you want to pause the screen and take it all in. Practically, creatively, it’s an incredible achievement.
When it comes to the story however, the deluge of awfulness quickly becomes tiring. We go into a movie wanting to feel things, and as such, a degree of manipulation is always involved – it’s the deal we sign up for. We want to be manipulated, but we don’t want to feel it happening. It’s a magic trick, both moviemaking and moviegoing, and not everyone can succeed at it all the time.
That such a farcically relentless avalanche of tragedy heads straight for Grace, makes that magic trick impossible. Those carefully crafted details get lost under the weight of whatever disaster befalls her next, and all those disasters coalesce into a big sludge of despair. The directorial hand pulling at our heartstring becomes too tangible, and the misery soon stops having an emotional impact – we know that nothing will turn out well, so we’re left spinning our wheels waiting for a guardian to go fully psychopathic, or for a hunky new man to be hiding a terrible secret. Honestly, you chop out half the horrible things that happen to Grace and Gilbert in this film, and it’d still be a bit much.
And yet. I must be honest and admit that the ending got me. Reader, I cried, and am not happy about it.
So, enter Memoir of a Snail at your peril. Even the most cynical are liable to be crushed beneath the weight of so much overt emotional manipulation.
★★★
