TIFF26: Stuffed Is Love, Death, and Tax(idermy)

With every remake, reboot, and decades-later sequel that’s currently playing at the megaplex near you, it can easily feel like movies are afraid of the bigger swings. It’s true to an extent, especially when it comes to Hollywood, but that just means you need to dig a little deeper to find truly inspired, out-of-the-box, unique tales. Folks at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival don’t have to look too hard to find one-of-a-kind storytelling because Theo Rhys’ Stuffed is part of the programming.

The easiest way to succinctly describe Stuffed is to call it a taxidermy musical. Araminta (Jodie Comer) has taxidermied every creature one could imagine. She’s a loner, and her neighbors believe that instead of stuffing these animals, she’s actually eating them. Needless to say, Araminta keeps to herself, but her one great dream in life requires the company of another. After stuffing birds, snakes, foxes, dogs, and more, Araminta wants to take on a human. She places an ad in the newspaper for someone who wants to be part of something extraordinary, and it’s sandwich factory employee Bernie (Harry Melling) who answers the call.

When pressed on why Rhys wanted to take on a story like this in a musical format, he and co-writer/composer Joss Holden-Rea explained that the best, most interesting people to burst into song are the most repressed. It causes those songs to feel like an explosion that’s so badly needed for these people. Bernie and Araminta haven’t had anyone to talk to for ages. They’re missing connection, compassion, emotion, and basic conversation. When they finally get even the smallest glimmer of it, these long-buried feelings are like a volcanic eruption. They have to strut through their mundane factory rooms and taxidermied home dancing because so much needs to be expressed. It’s not going to be neat and orderly. It’s going to cataclysmically explode and make them fall in love with life.

Comer has proven herself a chameleon after her star-defining turn opposite Sandra Oh in Killing Eve. Melling began his career as part of the Harry Potter franchise, but has been carving himself a niche in the world of endearingly awkward weird guys in indie movies. The chemistry between them is as electrifying as the seemingly ever-present lightning that accompanies much of the film. These actors are not afraid to wholly go for it, and Wyatt Garfield’s camera adores them. The close-ups of Comer and Melling as their characters process what it means to undertake the process of taxidermying a human allow for even the slightest quiver of indecision to be blown up on the big screen. It’s exceptionally rewarding when the first fleeting moments of romance trickle into their relationship.

The score and songs of Stuffed harken back to the Bernard Herrmann scores of the ’40s and ’50s. They’re sweepingly romantic, yet harsh in a gothic sense. The opening number takes place in the nursing home where Bernie’s mother resides. The residents sing about their desire to be remembered after their time on earth ends. “I will be remembered” is repeated throughout. Less as a hope or consideration, but as a desperate, urgent grasp at immortality. These themes of life, death, and memory are not limited to the people in the nursing home, but are the engines that propel Araminta and Bernie toward each other.

When Stuffed introduces the star-crossed lovers at the center of the movie, they both care very little about life itself. Their focus is on death and how this ending will allow them to have more of a purpose than they ever could while their heart is still beating. In this shared journey toward a goal, they begin to see that life has things to offer that death would rob them of. Stuffed may have a macabre premise, and its execution does live up to the promises made, but this is a tale as old as time. Two people, lost, lonely, and looking for love, find someone who understands them and sees that humanity, for all its ugliness, has moments of profound, irreplicable beauty. Stuffed is bursting at the seams with sweeping romance, embalmed for all of time.