A harried father and his sullen college-aged daughter drive through a lush forest, on their way to a working weekend with the family behind the pharmaceutical company that employs dad. He’s nervous and stressed, his daughter is checked out and maybe a little annoyed that dad might have been trading on the loss of her mother to garner sympathy with his bosses. Then, distracted, dad hits something in the road. There, sprawled on the pavement bleeding purple blood, is a…horse-shaped creature with a distinct protuberance.
Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn does not beat around the bush—while driving distracted, Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) runs over a baby unicorn. Scharfman, who is making his feature directorial debut, smartly avoids the trap of coyness, instead establishing upfront that unicorns exist and Elliot f-cking killed one. The mystery of Death of a Unicorn is not about the unicorns themselves, it’s whether or not humans can survive pissed off mystical beasts. Death of a Unicorn is essentially a slasher, with the unicorns as the unstoppable killers.
It's a GREAT idea, and one that Scharfman grounds in the folkloric tradition of unicorns, particularly as depicted in the French medieval “unicorn tapestries”, now on display in The Cloisters in New York. Elliot’s daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), serves as the film’s exposition machine, an art history major who can quickly and concisely interpret the story depicted across the tapestries, telling a cautionary tale of coveting that which humans are not meant to possess. (In real life, there is considerable debate about the meaning of the tapestries, and even the order in which they’re meant to be displayed.)
Death of a Unicorn is grounded in horror genre stylings—the unicorns are not charming, they’re monstrous—but thematically it’s a class satire, as Elliot’s boss, Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), who is dying, quickly gloms onto the magical properties of the dead unicorn to save his own life. The Leopolds are a thinly veiled take on the Sacklers, with sickly Odell cravenly exploiting anything at his disposal for his own benefit; his wife, Belinda (Téa Leoni), washing the family’s reputation through philanthropy; and their dipsh-t son, Shepard (Will Poulter), unrepentantly taking credit for other people’s work. It’s not an especially clever take on a billionaire family of socio-economic leeches, but In These Times, there is cathartic pleasure in watching the unicorns go after the Leopolds with unbridled fury.
The film succeeds entirely on the father-daughter grounding of Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, who form a believably damaged family unit, and the comedic performances of Will Poulter and Anthony Carrigan, who plays the put-upon butler serving the Leopolds. Whenever the film stumbles, which is increasingly throughout its final act, one of these four actors dependably delivers a joke with precision, or lands an emotional beat that carries the film to its next moment. Death of a Unicorn reminds me a lot of Opus, a similarly high-concept horror/social satire which runs out of steam about halfway through. So does Unicorn, but the sheer likeability of this cast powers the film to its finale.
And even though Unicorn shifts tone several times, the structure of the film stays firmly in the realm of a horror movie, which also helps carry it through its weakest moments. It’s always entertaining, because Scharfman is always coming up with fun horror moments, like a quick but gorgeous shot of a unicorn lurking in the shadows, a classic horror movie moment made fresh by, well, the damn unicorn. It’s just such a disarming monster, they’re not pretty, but Scharfman’s unicorns are compelling, at least in glimpses. This is definitely a film that would have benefitted from that old adage “don’t show the shark”, meaning the less we see of the monster, the more frightening it remains. That’s definitely true here; the unicorns are most effective when we only see bits and pieces of them.
Between reliably good performances from a group of reliably good actors and the killer unicorn concept, Death of a Unicorn manages to stagger to its conclusion without entirely falling apart. It’s doing too much—it’s a horror movie and a satire and a family drama!—and as smartly as Scharfman underpins his script with the mythological mysteriousness of unicorns, he does not give as much thought to his characters, who are all stock versions of broad archetypes like “sad dad”, “gloomy girl”, and “finance bro”. But the concept is so good, and the horror elements are done well enough to keep the energy up even as the characters lose the ability to hold the screen. The unicorns never lose their presence, though, and that’s enough for Death of a Unicorn. Who needs good characters when you have killer not-horses?
Death of a Unicorn will play exclusively in theaters from March 28, 2025.
