Adam Elliot, the Australian stop-motion auteur, scored an international hit with Mary and Max, his macabre account from 2010 of a real-life friendship rendered in unsettling monochrome.
Memoir of a Snail, his Oscar-nominated new film, draws on the director’s biography with the same unforgettable, grubby aesthetic. Elliot’s unusual background – he is the son of an acrobatic clown who grew up on a prawn farm in the Outback – is parlayed into a sombre tale of divided siblings.
The snail-obsessed Grace Pudel (voiced by the Succession star Sarah Snook) drily relates a family tragedy: she and her beloved twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), lose their mother during childbirth, leaving them to scramble through an impoverished childhood with a hopeless, alcoholic father.
Social services intervene; Grace is dispatched to a foster family of sexual swingers; her brother is sent to live with puritanical Christians, a community ill suited to dealing with his pyromania and homosexual tendencies.
Bridget Jones fans go mad about the movie in Dublin: ‘We’ve been told inside to bring tissues, that we’ll be crying and laughing’
Captain America: Brave New World review – Not even Harrison Ford’s last-ditch Red Hulk can rescue this cheap, garish mess
To a Land Unknown review: This uncomfortable film about Palestinian refugees adrift in Athens sweeps you along in its momentum
Memoir of a Snail review: A lovely, heartfelt creation from an Oscar-winning animator
Grace’s isolation is temporarily salved by the friendship of a devil-may-care elder, Pinky (Jacki Weaver). She is sexually preyed on by a pervert who briefly becomes her husband. Gilbert, meanwhile, has an even more miserable time.
Themes of mutilation, grinding poverty, loneliness and death ensure that this is an adult-only animation. Many Plasticine tears roll down wretched Grace’s cheeks as she becomes increasingly imprisoned by weight issues and agoraphobia. Her faith in “glasses half full and silver linings” is repeatedly tested. The invertebrates of the title are both pets and an allegory for her solitariness.
Pitch-black humour occasionally punctures the misery of Elliot’s dark, antipodean fable. The jokes are quite angular. The number plate of the bus that takes Gilbert away reads YRUSAD. For all the gloom, this is a lovely, heartfelt creation from the Oscar-winning animator.
