“Sweeney Todd with taxidermy” is the high-concept pitch behind Stuffed, a doozy of a musical black comedy that, ambitiously, attempts to make a serious point about modern-day loneliness and, thanks to its terrific core cast, pretty much succeeds. Not everything works, notably the rarefied nature of the score, which at time sounds like Rufus Norris’s quirky verbatim musical London Road (2015). That film, however, was adapted from a fairly well-known stage play, and it’s entirely possible that Theo Rhys’s debut feature can go the other way, being the perfect basis for an intimate, offbeat off-Broadway show.
The focus of this bizarre British calling card is Bernie Marshall, played by Harry Melling. Melling was last seen in last year’s BDSM love story Pillion being dominated by Alexander Skarsgard’s Alpha male biker Ray. Melling’s superpower is a strange one; his face always seems to bear the expression of someone about to drop 500 feet without a seatbelt on a Six Flags rollercoaster, and this ability to manifest existential horror is a core feature of Stuffed.
When we meet him, Bernie is working at a factory that makes egg and cheese sandwiches. No one there seems to know his name, even after years of service, and when he puts out a cake for his birthday it goes unmolested in the staff room. Worse is to come; while visiting his elderly mother at the nursing home — whose inmates burst into the first of many songs about being remembered or forgotten — Bernie is upset to discover that the old lady’s dementia has worsened, and she no longer remembers him. Does anyone else even know he exists? It doesn’t help that his favorite TV show — Everyday Stories, Extraordinary Lives — is a reality show celebrating have-a-go heroes.
But Bernie has never had a go, which is why his eye wanders to an advert in the local newspaper (one of Bernie’s hobbies, apart from keeping his toenail clippings in a jar, is cutting out obituaries). “Overlooked?” it wonders. “You could be exceptional.” It catches Bernie at a particularly low point (“My headstone, what would it say? / Here lies no one,” he sings mournfully). The ad gets a lot of attention, but it soon transpires that Bernie is simply so mediocre, his suitability is off the scale.
Which is how, at a funeral parlor, Bernie comes to meet Araminta (Jodie Comer channeling her inner Helena Bonham-Carter as a gothic, reclusive cat lady). Araminta puts her morbid nature out there from the start, noting that “the only thing that’s fixed is death”, and, more worryingly, asking Bernie if he has any family. “No,” he says, which isn’t technically true but may as well be. She presents Bernie with a stuffed duck. “You could be like him,” she says. “Live forever.” Scared, Bernie runs away and throws up.
It transpires that, unlike Bernie, Araminta has lots of friends. Like Snow White, she is surrounded by woodland creatures — rabbits, badgers even a deer — all frozen in time. Araminta is a taxidermist and has plans for something bigger, and somehow her macabre plan to fill Bernie with formaldehyde gets to him. While planning his own fake death, the first step along the way, Bernie sings about being immortal in a song darkly reminiscent of The Greatest Showman. The promise of posthumous fame appeals to him (“Why does death mean you have to cease to exist?”), and Araminta has conveniently managed to convince him that she is not a murderer (“Everything here was already dead,” she shrugs).
Will Bernie go through with it? Can Araminta go through with it? There’s lots resting on this tension, because there’s really nobody else in the movie, even with a surprisingly large cast of extras. Nearly two hours is a bit long for what is essentially a two-hander, but everyone concerned is on the same page — which means the film makes the very bold decision to follow this dark story of co-dependency to its natural conclusion.
Hal Ashby’s 1971 comedy Harold and Maude, with its Cat Stevens soundtrack, is about as close a comparison as you might find in this very niche genre, and like that film there is a tender undercurrent that overrides the escalating sense of WTF as Araminta gets closer to achieving her ambition. Despite the increasingly violent grand guignol on show, there’s actually a lot of nuance here, in its discussion not just of loneliness but the transactional nature of modern relationships. Are they really falling in love or are they merely a perfect fit? After all, Bernie has a good heart, and Araminta simply wants to pickle it.
Title: Stuffed
Festival: Toronto (Discovery)
Director: Theo Rhys
Screenwriters: Theo Rhys, Joss Holden-Rea
Cast: Jodie Comer, Harry Melling
World sales: Cornerstone Films
Running time: 1 hr 57 mins
