Stuffed Review: A Zany and Bleakly Romantic Body Horror Musical

Succinctly put, director Theo Rhys’ “Stuffed” is a musical about a man who agrees to be turned into taxidermy — only to fall in love with the taxidermist. The resulting film is somehow weirder, wondrous, and more wistful than what even that logline suggests. Its moribund eccentricities cannot be separated from the tenderness of its story because Rhys and co-writer and composer, Joss Holden-Rea, have taken the time to sculpt characters with interiority that feels invitational. In offering empathy for its protagonists, it celebrates when people find the other halves of their lives who not only match their freak, but enhance it.

The object of taxidermy and the one doing the taxidermy are played by Harry Melling and Jodie Comer, respectively, and it is evident that the two have given themselves joyfully to Rhys’ and Holden-Rea’s vision. They act as a true north star when the film is at its most zany and grisly. Melling’s Bernie, a factory worker whose role is to make sure the cheese on the sandwiches on the assembly line is placed properly on the bread, could be an earlier draft of the character he played in “Pillion”; someone comprised of big desires, meek disposition, bottling a dissatisfaction that has nowhere to go. He brings in a cake for his birthday, which his co-workers mostly avoid, and another lap around the sun puts the futility of his existence to his mental forefront. He’s given his best years to a thankless job that will have him replaced before anyone would attend his funeral. While he wrestles with whether the pain of not being remembered at all is worth more than the pain of only being remembered for being lonely, he sees that his mother’s dementia has worsened, to the point where she’s forgotten him. He settles on suicide, finding no reason to prolong an existence of isolation.

Responding to an ad in the newspaper puts Bernie in contact with Comer’s Araminta, a loner whose ultimate dream is to embalm a human body as the crown jewel of her taxidermy collection, which includes all sorts of fauna. If you are the company you keep, then the animals that Araminta surrounds herself with are a poetic self-audit: vivacious on the outside, but with insides so soft it renders her body mush. Comer continues to display her compelling versatility, playing the character as a ferocious whirlpool of id, someone whose clarity focuses with terrifying intensity when they are on the verge of completing their dream. Whenever we witness Araminta in the throes of her scheming – fantasizing about where she would place Bernie’s person in her collection – Wyatt Garfield’s cinematography frames her in a way that reminds us of the bodily toll obsession takes. We witness this mainly through close-ups of Comer’s spindly, bony fingers, which feel like they consume whatever they grip as snakes across surfaces. When she and Bernie finally meet in person, it’s a twisted riff on the meet-cute: he wants to die due to his loneliness, and she needs a body no one will miss.

As Bernie gets his affairs in order, in preparing to die, he realizes he might still have something to live for. Rhys’ and Holden-Rea’s script is patient in how it doles out the arcs of its duo, sweetly capturing the kind of love that makes you not just swoon but dream. As we see Araminta and Bernie fall for each other, it feels both surprising and ordained. As the two inch closer to their dreams, that proximity makes them question whether that is really what they want, or if they simply never found a person or opportunity that enabled them to imagine anything else. This gives the “will they/won’t they” stakes of a typical romcom a bit more weight, but something is all-enveloping about seeing these people come to life again, from Bernie starting to be more than happy to be a waxy boy toy, to wondering if Araminta might fancy him more if he stays living.

Once Bernie decides that he’s willing to die for Araminta just as she thinks she’s willing to live again for him, you can see the speed bumps they’ll encounter along the way. “Stuffed’ could have used another conflict to switch the film to a different gear or tap danced a bit faster to its end it is obviously barreling for, but its meandering is not without charm. Falling in love, after all, is rarely linear. The “turn” for the characters becomes far more believable because we have had a chance to see them wrestle internally. Everything from Holden-Rea’s swooning orchestral score, which makes even the most mundane of mise en scène, courses with emotional histrionics, is calibrated for loud emotions. Forgoing subtlety and (sometimes literally) wearing its heart on its sleeve means that we can be treated to hilarious sequences like when Bernie climaxes whilst Araminta is marking his body via Sharpie for where she will incise his corpse; a thrust at life amidst the arrangements for death.

The songs themselves are mostly composed of characters singing through dialogue, which can feel repetitive when nothing ever quite crescendos to any sort of chorus, but they feel essential, not obligatory. Take two of the film’s standout sequences: one where Bernie gives his two-week notice by dancing across the sandwich conveyor belt and where Araminta and he burn his car. The songs are a type of emotional exorcism, an expression of primal emotion that could not be shared in another way, with the rhythm of the film always framing them as a type of catharsis. What elevates these numbers too is the sharp writing, which strikes that balance between being pithy enough to be memorable without being trite. “Beauty is skin deep, / But it depends who does the skinning,” Araminta croons, while Bernie is able to summarize his mental state with “I don’t have much to give from this life I’ve barely lived.”

It’s far too easy to hollow ourselves out in the pursuit of being desired, but any relationship built on that kind of emptying cannot be true love. “Stuffed” asks its characters and its viewers to cut deeper, to not settle for cheap submission. Some life plans are only as good as their restructuring, and this is the kind of film that rejoices in the ways meeting someone sets our lives on completely new trajectories. Can we dare to love in a way that might change our desires? Are we willing to accept different dreams? May we all be lucky that when life gives us a coda, we find the person with whom we can transform it into a prologue for something new.