Memoir of a Snail review: this Oscar-nominated animation with Sarah Snook is a darkly funny, oddball delight

Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park isn’t the only stop-motion Play-Doh pusher on the block. Halfway around the globe resides equally brilliant Australian animator Adam Elliot, also an Oscar-winner for his 2004 short, Harvie Krumpet, about a chronically unlucky man with Tourette’s syndrome and a nudity fascination. He’s now up for another Academy Award in a few weeks’ time for this similarly off-kilter odyssey.

Besides more naked folk, there are plenty of other reasons to leave the kids at home; this looks like Nick Cave has crowbarred his way into Aardman studios and cursed the clay with a gothic, decidedly adult, cloak of doom. Joyous primary colours barely exist, replaced by an emo miserabilist’s almost monochrome mood palette. And, unsurprisingly, Cave has a small cameo here voicing a lovelorn postman who meets a toothy, grisly end.

It’s the story of twins Grace and Gilbert, who are orphaned at a young age — “When we left her womb, she entered her tomb,” says Grace of her mother’s death in childbirth, which gives you an idea that this isn’t finely calibrated humour.

Once their French, paraplegic, alcoholic father skips off this mortal coil too, the siblings are separated and sent to opposite sides of Australia to live in starkly different circumstances — Gilbert with a strict, religious family cult who wouldn’t balk at rolling out their “de-Satanizer” machine for some electro-convulsive gay conversion therapy; Grace with a couple of accountant swingers who eventually abandon her when they discover nude round-the-world cruises.

Elliot’s fascination with people taking their kit off suggests a rather schoolboy-like approach and the storytelling is correspondingly unsophisticated, but he makes up for this with bags of heart and a relentlessly inventive gonzo streak. There’s unlikely to be another film in which one of the characters makes love to John Denver in a helicopter.

Narrated lovingly by Succession’s Sarah Snook as Grace (who isn’t a snail, she’s just obsessed with them; and they do actually serve a metaphorical purpose), it’s sad, bleak but also brimming with charmingly wacky lolz. Much of that joie de vivre comes from Grace’s only friend Pinky, an ancient woman who’s done it all (including playing ping-pong with Fidel Castro as well as that chopper incident with Denver’s chopper).

However, there wouldn’t have been an Oscars nod without at least some kind of “deeper meaning” and, although it’s ladled on thick and heavy, Pinky’s message to Grace about not trapping yourself in a cage of your own making is something many of us might well have forgotten about.

Will it win on March 2? No, that’ll be The Wild Robot because it’s better, but this is almost as good and you won’t be entertained in quite the same, ickily beautiful way for some time.

In cinemas February 14