There are premises that sound like they were engineered to repel anyone who hears them, only to reveal an unexpectedly gentle pulse beneath all the discomfort. Stuffed, the feature debut from director Theo Rhys, appears built from precisely that contradiction. The 117-minute British musical centers on a lonely man who answers an amateur taxidermist’s advertisement seeking a human volunteer to be preserved after death. That is the point where many stories would pull out the loudest possible body-horror tools. Rhys and co-writer/composer Joss Holden-Rae instead steer the concept toward an eccentric, melancholy romance.

Jodie Comer plays Araminta, a withdrawn and imaginative taxidermist whose fascination with preservation has crossed into a deeply unsettling ambition. Harry Melling is Bernie, an isolated sandwich-factory worker who feels all but invisible in life. Their initial arrangement is morbidly simple: Bernie believes becoming Araminta’s permanent artwork may finally make him worthy of someone’s attention. Yet the longer the pair plan the details of his proposed death and preservation, the more the arrangement changes into something emotionally messier and more recognizably human.

It is a startlingly high-concept route into a story about loneliness. The film’s oddity is not incidental decoration, either; it is the mechanism that lets two people communicate feelings they cannot otherwise say aloud. A traditional meet-cute would not suit Bernie and Araminta. Their shared vocabulary is formaldehyde, old animals, death plans and elaborate creative rituals. Somehow, that becomes the basis for mutual recognition.

A musical with a premise built to make audiences squirm

Stuffed had its Toronto Film Festival premiere in the Discovery program, opening that section of the 2026 event. It was screened in London on August 28, 2026. The timing also puts Comer in an unusual position: a screen adaptation of Prima Facie, the stage work that earned her a Tony Award, is appearing at the same Toronto festival, with Cynthia Erivo taking on the screen role. Where Prima Facie represents a formidable dramatic showcase already associated with Comer, Stuffed asks her to enter a far less predictable register: macabre pop-opera, heightened romance and musical performance.

That willingness to choose the strange project is vital to the film’s identity. The premise could easily invite a knowingly smug, grotesque treatment, as if merely mentioning taxidermy and human preservation were enough to sustain a feature. Instead, Holden-Rae’s songs reportedly favor earnest, modern Broadway-style feeling. The music does not erase the queasiness of the central idea, but it gives the film a sincere emotional language rather than treating the entire exercise as a wink at the audience.

That sincerity matters because the story is dealing with a particularly raw form of invisibility. Bernie does not seek preservation only because he has a fascination with death. He has reached a point where being physically fixed in place sounds more desirable than being ignored while alive. The sentiment is tragic, absurd and oddly understandable in equal measure. Araminta’s attention, even when it is tied to an alarming artistic project, is attention he has not felt before.

For a broader look at how unconventional imagination can remain distinctly human rather than merely efficient, see Guillermo del Toro’s thoughts on creativity and its messy human edges. Stuffed seems to live in exactly those messy edges, where affection and revulsion coexist without being neatly separated.

Bernie and Araminta’s lonely world

Melling’s Bernie is defined by a life that has become painfully small. Socially awkward and closely tied to his single mother, he has spent much of his adulthood still orbiting her care. Now, as dementia takes hold and she no longer recognizes him, Bernie loses what may have been his one dependable human connection. His work at a sandwich factory underlines the routine and ordinariness of a life that has stopped offering him a way forward.

Related coverage includes ‘Stuffed’ Review: Jodie Comer and Harry Melling Lead a Strange, Sincere Musical.

Araminta is isolated for different reasons. Her introversion appears more deliberate and creatively directed, but it still places her at a distance from other people. Her interest in Bernie begins with his face: its vulnerable, rumpled quality is something she wants to preserve permanently. The attraction is flattering to him and alarming to everyone else, which is exactly the uncomfortable tension the film must hold. Bernie is confronted with someone who sees him in a way nobody else does, even when that gaze has disturbing implications.

As their connection develops, the central question becomes less about whether the taxidermy plan can happen and more about what it means now that the two have begun to care for one another. A project conceived as an end point becomes a problem. If each person has found someone capable of seeing them clearly, preservation may no longer be the only way to avoid disappearance.

Stylized Northern England, made deliberately shabby

The setting is a working-class Northern English environment rendered with a mixture of storybook stylization and worn-down thrift-store texture. Production designer Beck Rainford, whose credits include Ray & Liz and Club Zero, is a key part of the film’s tonal balancing act. The visual world can recall carefully composed whimsy, but it is reportedly never too polished or precious. The overcast surroundings, drab workplace life and makeshift quality of the spaces keep the characters’ sadness close to the surface.

Taxidermy also gives the production room for visual jokes, including the sort of deliberately unfortunate animal displays that internet culture has elevated into their own strange comic tradition. But the décor is not merely a series of punchlines. In a film about people who fear they will be forgotten, preserved creatures become an unsettling image of beauty, devotion and control. To keep something forever can be an act of love, an act of fear, or both.

Holly Rebecca’s costumes contribute to the mothballed atmosphere, while cinematographer Wyatt Garfield, editors Chris Dickens and Gareth C. Scales, and Holden-Rae’s music make up the principal creative team around Rhys. The cast also includes Claire Novelli, Jonathan Aris and Sian Gibson.

The performances have to sell the impossible

A film this tonally precarious depends on its leads refusing to play down to the absurdity. Comer and Melling are both positioned to take the musical material seriously while staying alert to the heightened horror and melodrama around them. The challenge is not simply that they need to sing. They have to make a romance built on a proposed act of human taxidermy feel emotionally credible enough that viewers can care about the people involved.

Melling’s particular screen presence suits Bernie’s fragility: the character’s dejected, open-faced quality can make him comical one moment and heartbreaking the next. Comer, meanwhile, has to make Araminta both captivating and unsettling, someone whose extreme creative vision never becomes an empty collection of gothic quirks. Their pairing is the film’s most important special effect. If their shared loneliness feels real, the bizarre conceit can become a framework for tenderness rather than a barrier to it.

The story was expanded from Rhys’ BAFTA-nominated short film of the same name. That expansion brings a structural risk: an ingenious short premise can lose its force when stretched across a full running time. The feature’s approach is to deepen both characters’ histories and let their bond proceed through multiple tonal modes, from offbeat romantic comedy to bleak adult fable and, eventually, a more fatalistic dramatic register.

Why ‘Stuffed’ stands apart

There is no shortage of films that use the language of damage, isolation and grotesque transformation. What makes Stuffed distinct is its apparent resistance to treating those elements as automatically cynical. Its world may be physically decayed, emotionally stifling and occasionally stomach-turning, but its leads are not reduced to a joke. Bernie and Araminta are people attempting, in the most maladroit manner imaginable, to escape the terror of being unknown.

That is a lot for a musical about taxidermy to carry. It is also why the project has such a memorable hook. Rhys and Holden-Rae have built a film where embalming is not simply a horror-image escalation; it is tied to the desire to be valued, held onto and understood. Whether audiences arrive for Comer, Melling, the musical angle or sheer disbelief that this story exists, Stuffed offers a singular proposition: a love story daring viewers to find compassion in its most unsettling corners.

  • Title: Stuffed
  • Director: Theo Rhys
  • Screenplay: Theo Rhys and Joss Holden-Rae
  • Music: Joss Holden-Rae
  • Cast: Jodie Comer, Harry Melling, Claire Novelli, Jonathan Aris and Sian Gibson
  • Running time: 117 minutes
  • Festival: Toronto Film Festival 2026, Discovery program opener