Fan of musicals? What about body horror? Is romance more your style? Mix them all together and you have the new film, Stuffed, that is heading to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Directed by Theo Rhys and written by Rhys and Joss Holden-Rea, the film stars Killing Eve star Jodie Comer and Harry Potter and Pillion star Harry Melling in a twisted romance about legacy and falling in love with your latest specimen. To celebrate the film heading to TIFF, we have an exclusive look at Comer’s character attempting to seduce Melling’s in front of a dead body.
Holden-Rea spoke about his excitement for Stuffed as it heads to TIFF and what it was like seeing Comer and Melling bring these characters to life. “The film is so chocked full of all these huge emotions and really heavy ideas of death and legacy, but this scene is such a great example of the subtle intimacy and humour that Jodie and Harry bring to everything,” he said. “She sings here about the fallacy of eulogies, and the impermanence of memory, which could feel like a real drag but there’s so much between the lines in Jodie’s performance. They both just always brought a huge amount of life and empathy to something that could so easily feel overly heady and ridiculous.”
Stuffed is described as follows: “Against a heightened, macabre backdrop, this bold musical follows Araminta, a taxidermist determined to stuff a human, and Bernie, a lonely soul desperate to leave a legacy, who volunteers to be her specimen. But as they set their plan in motion, an unexpected romance threatens to upend their deadly arrangement.” The clip includes Comer’s Araminta singing to Bernie (Melling) as the two are standing in front of an open casket, seemingly luring him into her plan to have him be her taxidermy human.
A Weird Musical Is Often the Best Kind
Part of what makes musicals such a fun medium to explore is that a character is expressing their emotions through songs that are supposed to represent something that is happening eternally. There are some musicals that play with the idea of the characters knowing they’re singing but often the idea is that the songs present in the musical itself are the inner thoughts and feelings of a character. Which does tend to allow creatives to get creative with the stories being told. With Stuffed, it joins the class of darker musicals like Repo! The Genetic Opera and Pippin in its themes. When asked about the sneak peek in question, Rhys spoke about how it sets the tone for the film:
“This scene is a real tone-setter for the film. I really love the combination of the rich, atmospheric lighting with the classical gothic setting — it really draws you into the peculiarity of their world. It also captures the core tonal balance of the film, which is finding intimacy within this plan for death,” Rhys said. “Throughout the film, Bernie and Araminta’s most intimate moments happen in the context of their plan for taxidermy, and in this scene we find this fascinating and awkward intimacy between them over the corpse. Ultimately, it’s death that brings them together.”
You can see Stuffed at TIFF.
