Stuffed: Still Life
By Rohan Connolly
Theo Rhys’ directorial debut Stuffed (2026) had its world premiere at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival. The macabre musical stars Harry Melling as Bernie, a factory worker searching for purpose, and Jodie Comer as Araminta, a lonely taxidermist on the hunt for a perfect subject. The film follows the two as Bernie accepts Araminta’s proposal to be her first experiment with human taxidermy, or as the characters put it: the first man to live forever. Stuffed is dark, humorous, charming, and beautiful. A perfect blend of Sweeney Todd (2007), Bones and All (2022), and Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023), the film asks what it means to live, to die, to love, and to be remembered.
Bernie lives a monotonous life. He goes to work on a conveyor belt assembly line for packaged sandwiches, his coworkers don’t know his name nor that he’s celebrating his 10-year employment anniversary. He visits his mother in a care home and they watch television together, sometimes she remembers him but most of the time she doesn’t, he goes home, and the cycle repeats. But Bernie wants to be extraordinary someday. Araminta spends her days stuffing animals, filling her empty house with the preserved corpses of animals she finds dead or wounded in her town. She greets them in the morning, giving the cats, birds, foxes, and more head scratches when she walks by them. She is ostracized by her neighbours who call her a cannibal and accuse her of stealing their pets. The two connect online when Bernie—desperate for something to make him feel worthwhile—stumbles across an ad for her website in the newspaper offering an opportunity to become extraordinary. When he eventually learns of Araminta’s desire to skin and stuff him, Bernie accepts. He has no connections to his life, nothing keeping him tethered to the world he lives in, why not finally live by accepting his own death?
What follows is an unconventional but beautiful love story, accompanied by a Sondheim-esque original soundtrack, impeccable costumes, and dashes of toe-curling body horror. Melling and Comer prove themselves as all-rounders in both their acting and singing abilities, the film almost entirely a two-person show, while Rhys establishes his filmmaking talent. The journey he takes the viewer on is one of accepting both life and death. If Bones and All is about the expression of love through consumption, Stuffed is about love as preservation. It is looking at preserving not only the body, but the human spirit as well. Bernie is a collector of obituaries, his dining room table sprawling with cutouts of every other Bernie that passes away, noting their accomplishments and their loved ones. Araminta is a collector of not only animal bodies themselves that were once part of the makeup of our world, but she also makes plaques for her most beloved creatures. Bernie, with his obituaries, collects the memories and the legacies of the other Bernies seeking to create a legacy for himself, wanting to be preserved and remembered. Araminta, with her animals, seeks to preserve life itself, believing that the stuffed creatures may still come alive when she’s not looking. As they prepare for Bernie’s final days as a living, breathing man, they teach each other that in life there is always death, but in death we can all find new life, and we are all eternal.