It’s a somewhat telling coincidence that “Stuffed,” a very peculiar new vehicle for Jodie Comer, is premiering at the same edition of Toronto as “Prima Facie,” the film adaptation of the stage hit that won the Liverpudlian actor a Tony last year, but with Cynthia Erivo taking over her role for the screen. “Prima Facie” could have given Comer a chance to dazzle a wider audience with what we already knew she could do; “Stuffed” will delight and/or bewilder a smaller one with what we definitely didn’t, namely Broadway-level musical emoting in a macabre pop-opera about a romance unfolding through the art of taxidermy. She scores points for risk-taking, then, but she also just scores: A high-wire high-concept piece like this stands or falls by the conviction that the actors bring to it, and Comer plays it from the gut.
So, for that matter, does Harry Melling — an actor who, following last year’s sub-dom romcom of sorts “Pillion,” seems to be making unlikely British indie love stories his niche. Which makes sense, given that he’s a pretty unlikely leading man: His slightly crumpled face, with its resting expression of forlorn, puppyish vulnerability, carries much of the comedy and the tragedy in Theo Rhys‘ endearingly bizarre debut feature, adapted and expanded from his BAFTA-nominated short of the same name. It’s those disarranged features and disconsolate mien that make his character, friendless factory drone Bernie, a figure of fascination for hermetic amateur taxidermist Araminta (Comer); she likes them so much, in fact, that she’d like to fix them in place forever.
