If a gothic musical starring Killing Eve‘s Jodie Comer as a taxidermist who dreams of stuffing a human was not on your film bingo list for 2026, then add it now so you can be the only one expecting its arrival. Starring Harry Melling alongside Comer, this is Theo Rhys’s feature-length debut, Stuffed, and it is anything but ordinary. Never shying away from the gory, bloody images that come to mind as soon as you read the plot of the film, it was strangely charming. But for as strange as the premise is, the film unfortunately becomes very predictable, turning into a too-long Sweeney Todd-reminiscent musical.
Bernie (Melling) is scared of being forgotten. Working his job assembling cheese sandwiches along with co-workers who do not know his name, the only other form of human interaction he has is with his mother, who lives in a care home and rarely remembers who he is. This is until he reads an advert in the newspaper, searching for someone who wants to be remembered. The advertiser is Araminta (Comer), a forlorn and lonesome taxidermist, who is searching for a human to stuff to fulfil her lifelong dream. Of stuffing a human. Promising Bernie an eternal life through her art, the two get to know each other through song and blood, while preparing Bernie for the end of his life as the two form a bond that they both may come to never want to break.
Jodie Comer stands out from the moment she is introduced in the film, compared to some more lacklustre parts of the film, and fully carries us through the remainder. Through some awkward songs and slow-paced moments, she fully transforms into this Lorde-lookalike who is anything but ordinary. It is an overused word, but she truly is unrecognizable in this role, committing to becoming the gloomy and misunderstood taxidermist who really just wants some company. Harry Melling is also great here, playing the classic meek character he’s come to be known as, with a strong singing voice in a role that is unfortunately less memorable than his counterpart.
The other standout is how the film fully “committed to the bit”. We can all admit that the synopsis of the film is absurd. The screenplay knows this and never dials itself back to be palatable. With full shots of a half-skinned house poodle, and animals around Araminta’s house in various stages of the taxidermy process, Rhys forces us into this home of the dead, then reminds us relentlessly of whose house we have chosen to enter. It goes full on macabre, and wholly works to tell this gothic love story.
Yes, I did say love story, because after all it is just that. A strange story to remind us that no matter how lonely we all are, we can find people out there who will love us as we are, quirks and all. This is when the film becomes a bit long, as the story it is telling is quite predictable within the first few beats of the screenplay. It follows this predictable pattern with increasingly repetitive-sounding songs, making the overall runtime, which is already long at just shy of 2-hours, feel like a marathon at times to get through. By the end, we catch ourselves groaning at yet another song being sung instead of the story just getting to the point we all know it is heading towards.
A good example of what I think the film wanted to do here would be Bones and All. It is hard not to compare this love story to Luca Guadagnino’s stylistic 2022 cannibal love story, even if its characters did not randomly break out into song. Guadagnino uses his absurd premise to talk about similar themes of being an outcast and finding love with someone when you have thought your whole life that no one would love you for who you are. But in Guadagnino’s case, the story itself is not cliché. It remains unpredictable throughout and uses elements of its genre of horror and the “road-trip movie” in the way it relays the overall themes. For Stuffed, the songs seem to be there for mere fun and further absurdity, which is fine sometimes, but when they aren’t that great, then I question why they are there at all.
These quips about the songs are coming from someone, myself, who really does love musicals. It is what convinced me to see this film in the first place. I love when they spontaneously break out into song and dance, and especially when music is used in absurd moments of a story or to tell a story that you would think never needed music to begin with. But I think that having almost all the songs being sung by Melling and Comer really holds the film back, as the songs get repetitive by about halfway through. There is only so much a person can do with their voice, so when every song has a similar vibe, with one of the two voices we are used to hearing, it just becomes mind-numbing.
I, unfortunately, did not leave the theatre of Theo Rhys’ latest musical gothic love story humming the songs that the characters sing. Nor can I even think of the tune of any one of them right now as I sit here and write this. What I can vividly recall is Jodie Comer’s brilliant performance, and unfortunately, that is about it. Dragging in the second half with repetitive songs and a predictable story, Comer rises out of the grave as the only life within this story of love and death, leaving behind the empty story ironically titled Stuffed.
Stuffed was screened at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Image courtesy of TIFF.
