‘Stuffed’ review: Jodie Comer and Harry Melling bond over taxidermy in bold, bracing gothic musical – Screen Daily

By Nikki Baughan2026-09-11T00:30:00+01:00
The debut of UK filmmaker Theo Rhys premieres in Toronto’s Discovery strand

Source: Toronto Film Festival
‘Stuffed’
Dir: Theo Rhys. UK. 2026. 117mins
In an unassuming corner of the UK, taxidermist Araminta (Jodie Comer) has honed her craft on all creatures great and small, and is now looking to take on the ultimate challenge – stuffing a human. When she advertises in the local paper for volunteers she meets Bernie (Harry Melling), a meek sandwich factory worker desperate to make his mark. This intriguing premise is the jumping off point for a bold, bracing debut from UK filmmaker Theo Rhys, which confidently navigates its hybrid tones – musical, romance, comedy, tragedy, horror. And while it may not be for everyone, Stuffed will undoubtedly appeal to genre fans looking for unique, ambitious storytelling.
A deliberately off-kilter, almost magical realist feel
Premiering as the opening film of Toronto’s Discovery programme, it is bolstered by two excellent performances from Melling and Comer, who approach this potentially challenging material with gusto. Inspired by the real-life case of a German cannibal and a man who wanted to be eaten, Stuffed began life as a 2021 short which won the special jury and audience awards in SXSW’s Midnight Shorts, and was nominated for a Bafta. This feature-length version should travel to further festivals and certainly has plenty to appeal to distributors.
The film’s setting, like its story, has a deliberately off-kilter, almost magical realist feel. Factory chimneys dominate the landscape, which is rendered in a beige, muddy colour palette with expressive skies. The actual location remains ambiguous (although the production shot in Wales) and, while the village name of Minchenbridge suggests the north, accents hold little clues. Technology is also vague: the factory’s sandwiches are made on a manual production line; we see no mobile phones; computers and televisions are clunky; cars are non-descript. Yet the meticulous production design, from Beck Rianford, is not intended to be period-specific, rather to create an unsettling out-of-time environment that befits this tall tale.
We first see Araminta, dressed in black and with wild curly hair, dragging a bloody sheep’s carcass across a field to her black van. Then we’re with Bernie who is desperately attempting to offer cake to disinterested colleagues at the factory where he’s spent the last 10 years. Next, we’re in Golden Sunset Nursing Home – where Bernie’s mother (Claire Novelli) lives with dementia – as the elderly residents suddenly burst into song about their desire to be remembered.
It’s an unusual start, but the screenplay from Rhys and Joss Holden-Rea (who also wrote the short) crucially plays the whole thing entirely straight. The musical numbers (penned by Holden-Rea) are not meticulously choreographed song-and-dances that interrupt the action but feel like a natural extension of it, emerging out of dialogue to offer a window onto a psyche. “Why am I struggling on through instead of cashing in my time?” sings Bernie in one moving early lament.
Melling’s Bernie – who collects his toenails in a jar and collects newspaper obituaries of anyone who shares his first name – is similar in some ways to Colin, the character he played in last year’s outstanding queer drama Pillion. Both start out as mild, non-descript men, both encounter someone who pushes their boundaries and forces them out of their comfort zone. Melling is certainly making some interesting choices in his post-Harry Potter days (he played Dudley Dursley), and here puts in a sympathetic, hugely likable performance as a man who finds that his true purpose in life may well come in death. Unsurprisingly, his burgeoning friendship with Araminta begins to change his perspective, and a lovely chemistry develops between these two kindred spirits.
Comer is a delight as Araminta, her defensive attitude masking intense vulnerability born from a deeply-rooted childhood trauma. She is focused, eccentric, but never mad; there’s a compelling reasoning behind her taxidermy ambitions, a compassion in her dealings with Bernie that never tips over into psychopath. That’s key in allowing the narrative’s warmer elements to come to the fore in the film’s second half, cinematographer Wyatt Garfield capturing the light that slowly begins to infiltrate their lives.
Yet this is undoubtedly a dark film, and Rhys leans into his gothic influences; there are echoes, of course, of Frankenstein – complete with brilliantly melodramatic lightning flashes; of Tim Burton’s horror musical Sweeney Todd; and, in its portrait of two lost souls bound by obsessions of the flesh, of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones And All. The camera does not shy away from the gore and grime of Araminta’s taxidermy pursuits, and the film finds tension between her newfound feelings for Bernie and her intense dedication to her craft. “All happy endings come with loss,” Araminta sings; a sentiment that fuels a film which explores the bonds between of intimacy and consent, death and desire.
Production companies: Agile Films, Fresh Fish Films
International sales: Cornerstone Films office@cornerstonefilm.com
Producers: Sam Ritzenberg, Dimitra Tsingou, Myles Payne, Hayley Williams, Danny Roberts, H.S. Naji, Jackie Langelier
Screenplay: Theo Rhys, Joss Holden-Rea
Cinematography: Wyatt Garfield
Production design: Beck Rainford
Editing: Chris Dickens, Gareth C Scales
Music: Joss Holden-Rea
Main cast: Harry Melling, Jodie Comer, Claire Novelli, Jonathan Aris, Sian Gibson
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