Stuffed Film Review: Preserve Me, Darling

Jodie Comer and Harry Melling sing every note of Stuffed, a macabre love story that’s one of the most original things at TIFF 2026.

Araminta (Jodie Comer, of The Bikeriders) runs a mortuary and does taxidermy on the side and she’s quite good at it. What she really wants is to work on a person, and she keeps that to herself for obvious reasons. Bernie (Harry Melling, of Pillion) works in a factory and visits a mother in a nursing home who no longer knows his face. This feeds his fears: he’s terrified of vanishing from the world without leaving a mark. When he hears what Araminta wants, he offers himself for the job. That arrangement becomes a courtship neither of them saw coming.

Rhys expanded Stuffed from his 2021 short, which won both the jury and audience prizes at SXSW and earned a BAFTA nomination. The feature isn’t that short stretched to 117 minutes. Rhys has described it as a runaway train compared with the original, and you can feel that freedom in the finished film. Joss Holden-Rea co-wrote the screenplay and composed the songs. When Rhys sent Melling the script, he also sent audio of Holden-Rea singing every number. Melling heard the music before he even read the scenes around it. By the final page, he was in.

The music is the biggest surprise. I expected a few songs sprinkled through a grim story. What I got was a full-bore musical with grand, gothic orchestrations. Right from the opening number, a wickedly caustic ditty sung by a group of care-home residents, Rhys makes it clear that the music isn’t decoration. It’s the movie’s language. Holden-Rea’s ballads have a Sweeney Todd bite, with dissonance, dark humor and harmonies that seem to curl in on themselves. Comer and Melling both have distinctive voices that fit their characters. Their harmonies can occasionally sound a little atonal, but that works with the film’s deliberately askew soundscape. When other voices join them, Holden-Rea opens things up into some terrific choral passages.

Comer keeps proving there’s nothing she can’t do. Araminta is prickly, strange and completely unembarrassed, and Comer plays her without a wink. She took a taxidermy course before shooting, and you can see it in the way she handles a scalpel. Melling matches her beautifully, both in style and musical register. A film this unusual only works if its leads completely buy into the same strange reality. These two do.

The visual design is just as committed. Wyatt Garfield shoots the film with enough warmth to keep the mortuary from becoming a haunted house, while Beck Rainford’s production design goes gloriously grimy and gothic. There’s a little Tim Burton and The Addams Family in the DNA, but it never feels like a copy of either. The sets, costumes and cinematography all seem to have been shaped by the music and tone. Holly Rebecca’s costumes add another layer of oddball personality without making the world feel like a recycled movie set.

Chris Dickens, whose credits include Slumdog Millionaire and Hot Fuzz, brings sharp timing to the editing, especially when the musical numbers take over. Rhys also understands when to let the darkness breathe before dropping another strange joke into the room. The result is a film that can be about death, loneliness and the fear of being forgotten one minute, then make you laugh at something completely absurd the next.

I honestly wish there were more movies like Stuffed. Give me the dark, askew musicals alongside Little Shop of Horrors, Stage Fright and Repo! The Genetic Opera. There’s room on that shelf next to the sunny State Fair romances and Greek-island singalongs. Stuffed is weird, but it’s never weird just for the sake of being weird. Comer, Melling, Rhys and Holden-Rea have made these bizarre people matter to us. Rhys has the perfect line for the whole thing: people say beauty is skin deep, but it really depends on who’s doing the skinning. Weird? Yes. Wonderful? Quite. Take the chance.

Stuffed was screened at TIFF on September 10, 2026.