Theo Rhys expands his short film Stuffed (B-) by asking a time-honored romantic question: If you truly love someone, would you let them preserve your corpse? Harry Melling plays a lonely sad sack terrified death will erase him. His solution leads to Jodie Comer’s equally isolated taxidermist, whom he offers his body after he dies. Their macabre arrangement soon blossoms into an increasingly complicated situationship. The film stitches together musical, romance and body-horror comedy with considerable imagination and surprising tenderness. That combination should collapse beneath its eccentricity, but Comer and Melling give these strange characters recognizable hearts. Comer finds vulnerability beneath morbid confidence, while Melling makes the need to be remembered funny, sad and painfully human. Their twee chemistry gives this melodic menagerie its pulse, even as the feature-length story begins to feel fluffed. Beneath the preserved animals and grotesque flourishes lies a sincere story about embracing a loved one’s peculiar passions. The enjoyable songs leave only a little lasting imprint, but the movie’s beautifully bizarre heart is preserved in exactly the right place.
The majestic Norwegian landscape looms large in writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord (B), but the moral avalanche unfolding on its terrain proves even more imposing. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play a Romanian-Norwegian couple who move their five children to a remote village where their conservative beliefs and disciplinary practices attract child-welfare authorities. Mungiu denies audiences an easy position from which to judge the stoic parents. Stan’s father can be controlling and deeply troubling, yet the authorities appear so convinced of their own moral superiority that compassion vanishes from the process. Each interaction shifts viewer sympathies without erasing the harm at the story’s center. Stan buries fear and humiliation beneath a rigid exterior, while Reinsve quietly devastates as a woman trapped between her husband, children and homeland. The long takes and clinical pacing effectively tighten the screws, although the film keeps underlining points it has already made clear. Cold, controlled and deliberately provocative, Mungiu’s film plays like a combustible discussion guide for the world’s most contentious talkback. Its argument lands: Empathy matters most when every side believes it has already won the moral debate.
More than 50 years after shocking audiences with this 1971 cult film, Ken Russell’s The Devils (A-) has lost none of its power to provoke, disturb and astonish. This restored version feels frighteningly relevant in an age when leaders weaponize religion, fear and public outrage. Oliver Reed delivers one of his finest performances as a charismatic 17th-century priest whose considerable appetites and resistance to authoritarian rule make him dangerous. Vanessa Redgrave is unforgettable as the sexually repressed nun whose obsession ignites an inferno of accusations, exorcisms and state-sanctioned cruelty. Her disciplined performance anchors material that frequently erupts into camp. Russell stages the film as a blasphemous fever dream. Derek Jarman’s dazzling white sets resemble an antiseptic cathedral from another universe, while every costume, gesture and grotesque image pushes the story toward delirium. Russell isn’t merely depicting hysteria; he places us inside it. The spectacle occasionally threatens to overwhelm the ideas, but Russell’s excess ultimately serves his message. The greatest obscenity here is neither sex nor sacrilege; it’s how easily powerful institutions manufacture guilt and call persecution holy. Russell’s film remains exhausting, audacious and impossible to forget.
