‘Stuffed’ Review: There Are No Certainties in Life Besides Death and Taxidermy in This Zany, Bleakly Romantic Body Horror Musical — SkimNews
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- Theo Rhys directed 'Stuffed,' a musical co-written and scored by Joss Holden-Rea about a lonely man who answers an ad agreeing to be taxidermied — only to fall in love with the taxidermist preparing his corpse.
- Harry Melling plays Bernie, a sandwich-assembly-line factory worker whose isolation and his mother's worsening dementia push him toward suicide as a preferable end to being forgotten.
- Jodie Comer plays Araminta, a reclusive taxidermist whose dream of embalming a human body is framed by Wyatt Garfield's cinematography through close-ups of her spindly fingers described as consuming surfaces 'like snakes.'
- The film premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival and is currently seeking U.S. distribution, meaning no American release date has been set.
- Standout musical sequences include Bernie dancing his two-week notice across the sandwich conveyor belt and the couple burning his car, with Araminta's lyric: 'Beauty is skin deep, / But it depends who does the skinning.'
- The review praises the film's emotional honesty in depicting love as transformative but notes it 'could have used another conflict' to shift gears before barreling toward its obvious endpoint.
Why it matters: 'Stuffed' earned a TIFF 2026 premiere and a largely positive review praising its emotional depth beneath a grisly premise, but with no U.S. distribution deal secured, the film remains inaccessible to most American audiences — a commercial limbo that will determine whether this unusual body-horror romance reaches a wider market or stays a festival curiosity.
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