Jodie Comer Is Singing in a Taxidermy Musical, and It Premiered at Toronto This Week

There is a coincidence in the Toronto programme this year that says something about where Jodie Comer's career has gone. Stuffed, an extremely peculiar new vehicle for her, is premiering at the same festival as Prima Facie, the film of the stage play that won her a Tony last year, with Cynthia Erivo taking the role for the screen.

One of those would have shown a wider audience something they already knew she could do. The other is a macabre pop-opera about a romance that unfolds through taxidermy.

The premise, stated plainly

A woman obsessed with preserving a human body forever advertises for a volunteer, to be killed and made into a fleshly artwork. A man who has spent his life feeling invisible steps forward, on the understanding that once he is stuffed he will finally be seen.

Written down, that is body horror of a fairly grim order. David Cronenberg could have made something disturbing and intimately sensual out of it, and nobody would have described the result as sweet.

Theo Rhys, making his debut feature, has arrived somewhere close to sweet, which is the genuinely surprising thing about it. The film is adapted and expanded from his BAFTA-nominated short of the same name.

A man who feels invisible while alive believes that once he is stuffed he will finally be seen

The two performances holding it up

Comer plays Araminta, a hermetic amateur taxidermist. Harry Melling plays Bernie, a friendless drone in a sandwich factory.

A high-concept piece like this stands or falls entirely on whether the actors commit, and the early reaction from Toronto is that Comer plays it from the gut rather than at arm's length. The singing is the unexpected part. This is Broadway-level musical emoting from a performer nobody had cast in that register.

Melling, following last year's Pillion, appears to be quietly building a career out of unlikely British independent love stories. His slightly crumpled face, with its resting expression of forlorn and puppyish vulnerability, does much of the comic and tragic work at once. It is also the engine of the plot: those disarranged features are precisely what make Bernie fascinating to Araminta, who likes them enough to want them fixed in place permanently.

The music is not a joke

Making it a musical sounds like a stunt, and the writer-composer Joss Holden-Rea has not treated it as one.

The songwriting is heavily indebted to the earnest modern school of Broadway balladry, and its plaintive quality is doing real structural work. The score could use a few more genuinely hummable tunes. What it supplies instead is sincerity, which a film this committed to strangeness badly needs somewhere in the mix.

Finding the tone takes a while

Stuffed does not locate its wavelength immediately, and the opening passages are where it wobbles.

The early stretch establishes Bernie's humdrum life with a fairytale naivety matched to his unworldliness, and there is a detectable hint of Wes Anderson in the framing. The production design by Beck Rainford, whose credits include Ray and Liz and Club Zero, is superb, and solves the tonal problem by grounding the stylisation in thrift-store scruffiness and a permanently overcast sky suited to the film's working-class northern setting.

Rainford also supplies a steady run of visual jokes for anyone who remembers the bad taxidermy meme that circulated online some years ago.

The risk in those opening minutes is that the film tips into baroque British tweeness, and it takes time to find the balance between that and the violence of its own premise. The atmosphere of physical and psychological decay is genuinely off-putting in places, deliberately so.

What it actually is

Once it settles, the rewards are distinctive and unexpectedly humane, which is a strange sentence to write about a film in which a man volunteers to be killed and mounted.

That is the trade Rhys is offering. A premise engineered to repel, played entirely straight by two actors taking a considerable professional risk, in service of an argument about being looked at properly by one other person.

It will delight some people and bewilder others, and the two groups may not be very different in size.