It’s a somewhat telling coincidence that “Stuffed,” a very peculiar new vehicle for Jodie Comer, is premiering at the same edition of Toronto as “Prima Facie,” the film adaptation of the stage hit that won the Liverpudlian actor a Tony last year, but with Cynthia Erivo taking over her role for the screen. “Prima Facie” could have given Comer a chance to dazzle a wider audience with what we already knew she could do; “Stuffed” will delight and/or bewilder a smaller one with what we definitely didn’t, namely Broadway-level musical emoting in a macabre pop-opera about a romance unfolding through the art of taxidermy. She scores points for risk-taking, then, but she also just scores: A high-wire high-concept piece like this stands or falls by the conviction that the actors bring to it, and Comer plays it from the gut.
So, for that matter, does Harry Melling — an actor who, following last year’s sub-dom romcom of sorts “Pillion,” seems to be making unlikely British indie love stories his niche. Which makes sense, given that he’s a pretty unlikely leading man: His slightly crumpled face, with its resting expression of forlorn, puppyish vulnerability, carries much of the comedy and the tragedy in Theo Rhys‘ endearingly bizarre debut feature, adapted and expanded from his BAFTA-nominated short of the same name. It’s those disarranged features and disconsolate mien that make his character, friendless factory drone Bernie, a figure of fascination for hermetic amateur taxidermist Araminta (Comer); she likes them so much, in fact, that she’d like to fix them in place forever.
In its briefest form, the logline for “Stuffed” promises body horror of the most morbid order: A woman obsessed with the idea of forever preserving a human body advertises for a volunteer to be killed and made into a fleshly artwork; a man who feels invisible while he’s alive steps forward, believing that once he’s stuffed, he’ll finally be seen. David Cronenberg could have done something vividly disturbing and intimately sensual with this idea, but it’s unlikely the result would have landed anywhere in the ballpark of “sweet” — which Rhys’ film, against substantial odds, actually is, even as its atmosphere of fetid physical and psychological decay turns the stomach a little.
If making the whole enterprise a musical sounds like something of a tongue-in-cheek stunt, meanwhile, that’s reckoning without the plaintive lyricism of writer-composer Joss Holden-Rea’s songcraft, which feels heavily indebted to the earnest modern school of Broadway balladry. The score could use a few more hummable tunes, but its sincerity is welcome in a film so rooted in extreme strangeness that it needs to dial down the quirk factor in at least a couple of areas.
Indeed, “Stuffed” takes some time to find a happy medium between the violent eccentricity of its premise and its potential for positively baroque levels of British tweeness. Its opening passages lean in the latter direction, outlining Bernie’s humdrum existence (complete with perfectly banal job in a sandwich factory) with fairytale-style naïveté to match his unworldly outlook, not to mention a hint of Wes Anderson stylization in the superb production design by Beck Rainford (“Ray and Liz,” “Club Zero”), albeit with a thrift-store scruffiness and perennially overcast backdrop to suit the film’s working-class Northern setting. (Rainford also provides ample sight gags for any viewers still tickled by the “bad taxidermy” meme that ruled the web a few years back.)
Once we getting into the more granular details of these people’s lives, however, they start ringing a little more true — and so in turn does the film. A socially awkward introvert devoted to the single mother who, it seems, raised him well into adulthood, Bernie is now returning her care as she slips into dementia — but when she stops recognizing him, it’s as if his sole connection with another human being has been snuffed out. Araminta, it gradually emerges, has a different backstory behind her withdrawal from the world, though her introversion is of a more confidently, creatively aloof variety. When Bernie responds to her ad, he’s astonished that someone so interesting and witchily beautiful should have designs on his body, even if those designs involve formaldehyde: She practically flatters him into a death wish.
Yet the more time they spend together, mapping out their exact plans for his demise and preservation, the more they appear to be peas in one very lonely pod, and mutual intrigue turns to affection. Where does that leave the gruesome project that binds them together? Rhys and Holden-Rea’s script — deftly and quite knottily expanded from the story’s shorter format — takes the central relationship through stages that nod, by turns, to the odd-couple romanticism of Richard Curtis and the knife-twisting adult storytelling of Roald Dahl, with a final dose of Shakespearean fatalism for good measure.
None of which would convince if Comer and Melling weren’t so honestly committed to the bit. Both quite capable singers, they’re alive to the kitsch excesses of the film’s horror, melodrama and musicality, not to mention Holly Rebecca’s suitably mothballed costumes. But they play it just straight enough too: Together, they find a deep, calcified sadness to these oddballs, a desperate need to do something, anything extraordinary, and, finally, a giddy flicker of empathetic self-recognition in each other. It’s that sadness, and that relief, that ultimately dignifies them and their demented mission — and that makes “Stuffed” a more poignant ode to human embalming than anyone might have thought possible.
