Producers: Liz Kearney and Adam Elliot  Director: Adam Elliot   Screenplay: Adam Elliot   Cast: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Tony Armstrong, Paul Capsis, Bernie Clifford, Davey Thompson, Charlotte Belsey, Mason Litsos and Nick Cave   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: B+

Embracing Adam Elliot’s second Claymation or, to use his preferred term, Clayography feature requires a rather skewered sense of humor, but those possessing one will find it both funny and poignant, sad and, in the end, life-affirming.  In wonderfully tactile, imaginative hand-crafted animation supervised by John Lewis, “Memoir of a Snail” tells a wildly off-kilter tale of twin Australian siblings whose lives are wracked by multiple tragedies but wind up happy in the end.  You could call it Dickensian, but with a flavor all its own.

Their story is told in autobiographical terms by Grace Pudel (voiced as a child by Charlotte Belsey and a grown-up by Sarah Snook) as she sits morosely remembering her recently-deceased best friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver, deliciously over-the-top), a high-spirited eccentric.  Grace’s English mother died giving birth to her and her brother Gilbert (Mason Litsos as a boy, Kodi Smit-McPhee as a young man) in 1972.  Their father Percy (Dominique Pinon), a Frenchman who’d met his wife-to-be while busking as a juggler in Paris (a side job supplementing his work as a stop-motion animator) and followed her to Melbourne, gave Grace her mother’s collection of snail-themed knickknacks, which became symbolic of her mollusk-style attitude of shelling herself off from society—a trait accentuated by the bullying she suffered over her cleft lip, which led nasty kids to call her rabbit-face, and by a cap, topped by some pipe cleaners adorned with ping-pong balls for eyes, she wore.  Gilbert always rose to her defense, but the pint-sized kid was mostly obsessed with matches, dreaming of becoming a fire-eating busker someday.  Grace, meanwhile, performed acts of kindness on her own, like tending to a drunkard named James (Eric Bana), an erstwhile judge removed from the bench for conduct unbecoming.

The twins became orphans when Percy, who was confined to a wheelchair after being struck down by a drunken driver while performing (and had become an alcoholic himself), died shortly after taking them on a roller-coaster ride in a local amusement park.  They were separated, with Grace adopted by a pair of self-improvement-minded swingers, Ian and Narelle (both voiced by Paul Capsis) in Canberra, the city in Australia’s extreme east advertised as the world’s safest, and Gilbert sent to live with a family of religious zealots headed by Ruth (Magda Szubanski) and Owen (Bernie Clifford) in far-west Perth.

We’re informed of the experiences of both, Grace’s through her own recollections and Gilbert’s through the letters he sent her.  Grace attempted to make social contacts but mostly remained isolated, her marriage to a handyman named Ken (Tony Armstrong) having turned out badly, until she met the elderly Pinky, once an exotic dancer but now a wickedly wild old lady who became her confidante and, in a way, mentor.  Much time is devoted to Grace’s recitation of Pinky’s real or imagined adventures, including two hilariously brief marriages (one to a character voiced for a few seconds by Nick Cave) and encounters with the likes of John Denver and Fidel Castro.  With Pinky Grace develops a rare real friendship.  She also experiences karma when James returns at a pivotal moment in her endless efforts to secure every bit of snail collectables she can.  (She also maintains a family of real snails in a bottle, and is finally freeing them while weeping over Pinky’s demise.  We’re periodically directed to the slow progress of her favorite, Sylvia, as she continues her halting movement forward—serving not only as a symbol of all life’s inevitable motion, but as the means by which Grace realizes the location of a lost treasure.)

Though Grace’s life is a struggle, Gilbert’s is worse.  His adoptive family own an apple orchard and compel him to work in the business, paying him little and forcing to give over the pittance he makes to their oddball church.  Ruth punishes the rebellious boy at every opportunity, and when she finds that he and one of his foster brothers, Ben (Davey Thompson), are developing what she considers an unhealthy relationship, she organizes a hideously torturous exorcism that leads Gilbert to exercise his pyromaniac proclivities against the clan.  The result, unhappily, is the boy’s death, reported by Ruth to Grace on the very eve of her wedding to Ken.  Happily, the demise turns out to be of the Mark Twain variety, and just as Grace is unveiling her first effort at a stop-motion film. a dream inspired by her father, she gets the surprise of a lifetime.

As all this will indicate, “Memoir of a Snail” is not a film directed toward children, unless they be tykes with the adult tastes of young Grace and Gilbert, who are shown reading such tomes as “Lord of the Flies” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.”  It’s also remarkably mature in terms of its eroticism; Pinky’s amorous inclinations and the ultimate residence of Grace’s adoptive parents at a nudist colony suggest as much, and when it comes to Ken’s interest in Grace, and Ben’s in Gilbert, it moves into territory parents might feel wary about their offspring watching.

But for grown-up viewers who appreciate something off the beaten track, this abundantly clever example of animation that magically melds tragedy and comedy will prove a consistently inventive and engaging treat, delivered with scruffy visual panache by Elliot (the production designer as well as writer-director), his stop-motion crew and editor Bill Murphy.  Nor should one overlook the superlative voice work down the line and the lovely score by Elena Kats-Chernin, which manages to reflect the essence of each changing mood with its piano and violin solos and alternating bubbly and morose tones.

Elliot has fashioned a “Memoir” that’s genuinely worth remembering.

Producers: Cillian Murphy, Alan Moloney, Matt Damon, Drew Vinton and Catherine Magee   Director: Tim Mielants   Screenplay: Enda Walsh  Cast: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley, Emily Watson, Zara Devlin, Agnes O’Casey, Mark McKenna, Helen Behan, Liadan Dunlea, Claire Dunne and Louis Kirwan   Distributor: Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions

Grade: B+

The now-infamous Magdalene laundries in Ireland, run by Catholic religious orders, housed unwed mothers who were compelled to work there in dire conditions until their babies had been born and given away for adoption. Since reporting of their scandalous practices became widespread in the mid-1990s, the laundries been the subject of repeated film treatment—sometimes directly, as in Peter Mullan’s angry “The Magdalene Sisters” (2003), and at others more obliquely, as in Stephen Frears’s “Philomena” (2013). 

Tim Mielants’ film, adapted by Enda Walsh from a 2021 novel by Claire Keegan (whose short story “Foster” was the basis for Colm Bairéad’s extraordinary 2022 “The Quiet Girl”) uses one of the convents as the impetus for an ordinary man’s crisis of conscience in the mid-1980s, when the institutions were still under the protection of the Catholic Church, a dominant power in Ireland, and a compliant, even subservient, government.

The man is Bill Furlong, played by Cillian Murphy in a quietly moving minimalist performance, in which the slightest of gestures carries remarkable depth of emotion.  Bill’s a shy, reserved fellow who makes a living delivering coal in the town of New Ross, a family man with a supportive wife named Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and five high-spirited daughters, and a devout Catholic.  One day as Christmas is approaching, he makes a delivery to the local nunnery, where he sees a distraught young girl, Sarah Redmond (Zara Devlin), being forced into the place by her mother. 

That sight, along with an encounter with a beaten-down boy whose father is a notorious alcoholic, sets Bill thinking about his own upbringing, when he was an unhappy misfit because of the circumstances of his own birth.  His mother, also named Sarah (Agnes O’Casey), might have been sent to the Magdalene were it not for Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), a not terribly warm but still compassionate woman who brought Sarah into her household, and allowed her to raise her fatherless son Bill (played in extensive flashbacks by Louis Kirwan) there.  When his mother suddenly died Mrs. Wilson and her farmhand Ned (Mark McKenna) became Bill’s only “family,” though the other local boys treated him badly.

Bill encounters the young woman when he goes to the convent to deliver an invoice for his services; she’s scrubbing the floor alongside some other girls, and begs his help to escape.  Though obviously moved by her plight, he allows himself to be hustled away by one of the nuns.  Returning with another delivery, however, he finds her hiding in the coal room, and returns her to the nunnery.  This time he’s taken to see the Mother Superior Sister Mary, whom Emily Watson brings to formidable life with a look of impassive severity surrounded by her tight-fitting wimple.

Sister Mary, whom we also see sternly leading the responses at a parish mass, cannily questions Sarah to encourage the girl to suggest she’s being well treated.  But perceiving that Bill isn’t convinced, she offers him tea (a telling note is interjected when she almost berates the elderly nun who drops a utensil while delivering it, but restrains herself), and then engages in apparent small talk that’s actually intended to intimidate.  She asks about his younger daughters, saying she’ll try to find places for them in the crowded parish school when the time comes.  And to cement things she ostentatiously writes out a Christmas card, into which she slips in a few bills, for Bill to deliver to his wife. 

But Bill’s concerns attract attention.  Eileen remarks that sometimes in life one has to ignore unpleasant matters to get along.  His friend, pub owner Mrs. Kehoe (Helen Behan), reminds him of who holds the reins of power in the town, and the damage they can do.  The question, of course, is whether Bill, who benefited from unusual kindnesses himself, can overcome his natural inclination to intervene—to make what might seem a small gesture but one that can make a world of difference in a life—and stand idly by while the brutalities continue, as so many must have done before the revelations of the 1990s brought down the Magdalene laundries and the corrupt system that enabled them to go on for so long. 

Like Mullan’s, this is an angry film, but it’s one in which the anger simmers rather than exploding melodramatically, as exhibited most clearly in the strictly controlled performances of Murphy and Watson, whose confrontation scene is imbued with a coiled tension that puts most horror films to shame.  These are brilliant pieces of acting, and though in the supporting cast only Walsh, Devlin and Kirwan get extended opportunities to shine, virtually everyone provides a sharply-etched moment, down to those with the briefest cameos.

The period detail provided by production designer Paki Smith and costumer Alison McCosh is spot-on, and the gloomily burnished cinematography of Frank van den Eeden captures it all with a tone of sad resignation.  Alain Dessauvage’s editing is leisurely to an extreme, giving Murphy every second he needs to capture Bill’s emotional turmoil, and Senjan Jansen’s score adds to the mood of melancholia.

There are elements in “Small Things Like These” that might strike one as somewhat heavy-handed in their symbolism.  The shots of Bill repeatedly washing off the black coal dust that’s accumulated during his rounds each time he gets home at night, for example, take on a Pontius Pilate vibe that becomes rather hectoring.  But the final scene earns its quietly triumphant feel as at least one man decides to stand up to a malignant system, even if we know it would endure for another decade. This is a powerful film about a man confronted by an endemic evil he must choose either to tolerate or resist, spotlighting another award-caliber performance by Cillian Murphy.