Jodie Comer and Harry Melling in Body Horror Musical

Of the sadly many dwindling artforms whose slow (or rapid) declines we’ve been mourning over the years, the original musical is high on my list of sorrows. Broadway struggles to launch successful new works — meaning, ones not based on a movie we’re nostalgic for, or built around the jukebox catalog of a beloved artist — and they’re practically non-existent on film, save for some arthouse stuff like Leos Carax’s Annette or Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End. We’re starved for new stories set to new songs.

Culture has also been doing some fretting about the state of the movie star, as one class ages into their golden years and not terribly many actors seem poised to replace them. In that regard, I’ve long been invested in Jodie Comer, a Brit who burst onto the scene in the television series Killing Eve. Following that show’s success, Comer delivered a series of film performances that, in combination with her boggling stage work in the awards-bedecked Prima Facie, had me boldly considering a possibility reserved for a precious few performers: Could she be the heir apparent to Meryl Streep?

She’s just so captivating and chameleonic, so different in The Bikeriders from how she is in The Last Duel, finding such distinction between one post-apocalypse movie (The End We Start From) and another (28 Years Later). There’s a determination in her eyes, a fiercely committed fire to her choices, that makes me think of a young and hungry Streep in her wild run in the late 1970s and 1980s. The trouble is, Streep first found her footing in a very different kind of Hollywood, one that, amid a lot of junk, made enough films to showcase her prodigious talent. Comer, on the other hand, has arrived in a much more uncertain time in the industry. Good roles are scarcer, financial success has been tethered to franchise output. She has not gotten the roles she deserves, I don’t think, the ones that could finally, for all to see, confirm her as a next great hope. 

With those two concerns in mind — a longing for original musicals and a wary optimism about Comer’s best-of-a-generation prowess — I went into Comer’s new movie-musical Stuffed wanting it to be a smash. Though it is based on a short film, Stuffed is really a new thing altogether, conceived by director Theo Rhys and his co-writer Joss Holden-Rea, who also wrote the music. Maybe the film could serve a noble double purpose, putting Comer on the right career track and giving a jolt of energy to a languishing medium.  

Alas, the film is instead a discouraging slog, a mess of cheap shocks and painful lyrics. It seems inspired by some mix of Sweeney Todd and the dreadful true-crime case of the German guys who set up a date so one of them could eat the other. It’s an icky musical, but one that endeavors to find the sweetness — the romance, even — in the muck. To admit to some bias, that particular genre has never really been my cup of tea. But Stuffed serves up an especially acrid brew, plodding along unmelodiously until its foregone conclusion. 

Comer plays Araminta, a bizarre loner who lives in what could be called, by many standards, a house of horrors, full of taxidermied animals and body parts in jars of vinegar. She’s feared and loathed by the locals, who think she ate her mother’s corpse after she died, and is fixated on her dream of turning a human being into one of the stuffed creatures that keep her company. She puts feelers out online, but it’s mostly fetishists and trolls who reach out to her. 

Across town, there’s lonely sad-sack Bernie (Harry Melling), a loveless young man who works at a food processing plant and drops in for visits to his dementia-addled mother, with whom he used to be inseparable. He desperately longs to be special, to be remembered, to make an impact on the world somehow. Understandably then (I guess), he’s intrigued by Araminta’s pitch to make him something of a pioneer — the first person to live forever. (In Araminta’s notion of life, anyway.) 

And thus the two meet creepy-cute, embarking on preparations for Bernie’s great transition and occasionally singing bland and repetitive songs. While Holden-Rea’s core melodies can be pretty, his lyrics are woefully simplistic, as if they were churned out by a rhyming dictionary bot that traffics in the broadest, most generic of sentiments. It’s one thing to hear a character clunkily sing their motivation once, it’s another to hear it time and time again, with so many of the same rhymes.

The film is also far less risqué than it perhaps thinks it is. Much of the humor relies on the audience chuckling at the discordancy of sweet music scoring talk of death and guts and tissue, amused by the idea these two freaks living in such an ugly and forbidding place could see any of it, or each other, as beautiful. But we’ve been down that juxtaposition road before, in Sweeney Todd, in Tim Burton films, in Urinetown, in Tim Burton’s film version of Sweeney Todd. Disappointingly, Stuffed is not guided by much fresh perspective or narrative ingenuity; a mere oddball premise is not enough on which to hang a whole film. It all wears pretty thin, pretty quickly, and then there’s another hour to go. 

On the Comer front, at least, the news is better. She finds a way to distinguish Araminta from myriad other weirdos we’ve seen in similarly-hued films, and keenly locates the actual person under all the mannered characterization of the script. She sings quite well too, working hard (and sometimes successfully!) to elevate the banal lyrics to something like poetry. She’s well matched by Melling, who has a voice like an angel, though were I on his management team I might advise him to seek out some more varied roles going forward. Too often in Stuffed, it feels like we’re watching Melling’s character from Pillion unravel after his breakup with Alexander Skarsgard. (And I wouldn’t blame him one bit.) 

The film is to be commended for building itself from the ground up, but the work is dismayingly slapdash. Rhys creates some nice images and certainly knows his way around a sequence; if only he had stronger material to support all that visual panache. He certainly had a tremendous collaborative asset in Comer, though; she carries the carcass of the film — its inert mass of canned provocation — as far as humanly possible. We leave Stuffed hungry only for more of her.