Sep 14, 2026 · 14 min · 9 segments
What happens when a lonely taxidermist looking for her first human subject meets a lonely man willing to volunteer for the job? Apparently, you get a musical romance. In this episode, I'm talking…
Alex HeeneyHost
Jodie Comer stars as Araminta, a taxidermist who spends her days stuffing dead animals and talking to them as if they're friends.
Harry Melling plays Bernie, who works a miserable factory job where nobody knows his name and spends his free time either alone or visiting his mother in a nursing home who has dementia and no longer knows who he is.
And most of the film is kind of a chamber piece with just the two of them either together or apart because they don't have anyone else in their lives.
It begins with a musical number at the nursing home where all of the older people there are talking about the lives that they've lived, and it feels like they've really lived.
They've had careers and partners and children, which sets up Araminta and Bernie in direct contrast to that.
It's also the one big group musical number in the film, and it reminded me a lot of the opening of one of Woody Allen's lesser-known films, Everyone Says I Love You, which begins in a hospital with patients singing about making whoopee.
It's not exactly joyful, this song, unlike the Woody Allen film, but it's not full of longing or sadness the way a lot of the songs that Araminta and Bernie will sing are.
Before we meet Araminta and Bernie, they each sing songs on their own, and they each sing an I Want song, which is very par for the course of a musical.
But it feels necessary here because they don't have anyone to unfold themselves to, but they are full of emotion, so of course the only way to express that is by breaking out into song.
Before they even meet though, they're already singing together, and neither Bernie nor Araminta sing with anyone else in the film.
They end up meeting because she places a ad asking if people want to be extraordinary, and he responds to it, not realizing that what she means by this is sign up to be her first human taxidermy project.
And when he is at his computer making a video for her, we get a split screen of the two of them at their computer screens, her watching the video, and the both of them touching each other's screens as if reaching out to one another across the split screen for the first time.
So the musical connects Araminta and Bernie before they've even met, when they're not even in the same room.
But there's another kind of distance between them that doesn't disappear once they are standing in the same room.
These are two people who are lonely and alone for a reason because they don't know how to reach out and connect to somebody else, which means that even when they're in the same room together, they don't always know how to communicate how happy they are to be there together.
But song gives us access to their innermost thoughts, and now they can be in the same space singing a duet without actually, in the world of the film, hearing each other, but we can hear them having a moment of connection even if they don't know how to say it to one another.
Jodie Comer stars as Araminta, a taxidermist who spends her days stuffing dead animals and talking to them as if they're friends.
Harry Melling plays Bernie, who works a miserable factory job where nobody knows his name and spends his free time either alone or visiting his mother in a nursing home who has dementia and no longer knows who he is.
And most of the film is kind of a chamber piece with just the two of them either together or apart because they don't have anyone else in their lives.
It begins with a musical number at the nursing home where all of the older people there are talking about the lives that they've lived, and it feels like they've really lived.
They've had careers and partners and children, which sets up Araminta and Bernie in direct contrast to that.
It's also the one big group musical number in the film, and it reminded me a lot of the opening of one of Woody Allen's lesser-known films, Everyone Says I Love You, which begins in a hospital with patients singing about making whoopee.
It's not exactly joyful, this song, unlike the Woody Allen film, but it's not full of longing or sadness the way a lot of the songs that Araminta and Bernie will sing are.
Before we meet Araminta and Bernie, they each sing songs on their own, and they each sing an I Want song, which is very par for the course of a musical.
But it feels necessary here because they don't have anyone to unfold themselves to, but they are full of emotion, so of course the only way to express that is by breaking out into song.
Before they even meet though, they're already singing together, and neither Bernie nor Araminta sing with anyone else in the film.
They end up meeting because she places a ad asking if people want to be extraordinary, and he responds to it, not realizing that what she means by this is sign up to be her first human taxidermy project.
And when he is at his computer making a video for her, we get a split screen of the two of them at their computer screens, her watching the video, and the both of them touching each other's screens as if reaching out to one another across the split screen for the first time.
So the musical connects Araminta and Bernie before they've even met, when they're not even in the same room.
But there's another kind of distance between them that doesn't disappear once they are standing in the same room.
These are two people who are lonely and alone for a reason because they don't know how to reach out and connect to somebody else, which means that even when they're in the same room together, they don't always know how to communicate how happy they are to be there together.
But song gives us access to their innermost thoughts, and now they can be in the same space singing a duet without actually, in the world of the film, hearing each other, but we can hear them having a moment of connection even if they don't know how to say it to one another.
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