“Eat the rich” satires didn’t start under Trump, but it certainly feels like they’re accelerating of late. We’re less than a month removed from the release of Bong Joon Ho’s loopy anti-capitalism allegory Mickey 17, where the sci-fi equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burned involves a wealthy white lady making savory sauces out of the Indigenous population, and only a few years removed from the likes of The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, and Ready or Not — just to name the ones that jump immediately to mind. With the release of Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn, which parks its Bugatti in the same garage as those films, it would be nice to report that the commentary is becoming more pointed, less familiar, and has devised a grand comeuppance more imaginative than watching blinkered billionaires be torn apart by wild animals. Sadly, that’s not the case. Broadly conceived, self-satisfied with its bushel of low-hanging fruit, and consistently underwhelming as an outré comedy, creature-feature, and earnest reconciliation drama, Death of a Unicorn recalls one of those famed adventures in the screen trade where someone sold a multi-million dollar project based on a concept jotted down on a cocktail napkin, only nobody bothered to flip the paper over and flesh out the idea.
What the film does have going for it is its high-concept premise, which may have been enough in and of itself to attract movie stars like Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, as well as a trendy mini-major studio like A24 to foot the bill. Although the film’s title recalls The Killing of a Unicorn, Peter Bogdanovich’s reviled memoir of the late Dorothy Stratten, the horned beast in Death of a Unicorn is entirely literal. When nebbishy compliance attorney Elliot (Rudd) and his estranged, college-aged daughter Ridley (Ortega) are summoned to the remote vacation home of the pharmaceutical titans the Leopolds, the former views this as a chance to spend quality time together in the aftermath of a recent family tragedy, while the latter resents being dragged along to help her dad further ingratiate himself to scummy pill-pushers.
Driving through the middle of a sprawling wildlife reserve while fighting a losing battle with his allergies, Elliot briefly takes his eyes off the road and accidentally plows his rental car into a large animal standing in their path (laser-focused on what’s really important, he assures his daughter not to worry; he paid for the collision insurance). Expecting to find a deer or moose, father and daughter are astonished to discover an actual baby unicorn lying in agony, hemorrhaging purple blood. Ridley touches the animal’s horn and is treated to a mind meld-cum-headshop AV presentation where she bonds with the creature (or something), that is until Elliot attempts to end the unicorn’s suffering by caving in its skull with a tire iron, splattering both of them with grape-colored goo. Finally arriving at the Leopolds mansion with the carcass inexplicably tucked away in the cargo hold of their car, Elliot attempts to play it cool while schmoozing with dying patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant, playing a wan, less precise version of his Saltburn character), his NGO-supporting wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and their grown (fail)son Shepard (Will Poulter) — Ridley, meanwhile, is still spiraling out over what’s just transpired. The funny thing is, not only does she still feel a psychic connection to the mythical creature, but the blemishes on her cheek have cleared up in the exact spot she was splattered with blood (for what it’s worth, Elliot’s allergies and hyperopia have also magically resolved themselves). And then there is the matter of the strange, agitated noises coming from their rental car which can no longer be politely ignored by the Leopolds or their live-in staff.
It would appear that killing a unicorn is a lot harder than it seems. The same regenerative properties that cured Ridley’s acne allow the animal to heal itself over and over again, something the characters in the film are remarkably slow to pick up on. Having killed the animal for a second, but not final, time, Odell begins to contemplate the medicinal qualities of the unicorn’s corpse and immediately undergoes a series of experimental treatments synthesized from its glowing horn. Within a matter of hours, his late-stage cancer has miraculously gone into complete remission, and with his new lease on life he and his ghoulish family begin to scheme over how they might sell this panacea to their network of uber-wealthy donors and friends, all while Elliot finds himself tempted by promises of being a profit participant to the greatest medical discovery in history. Meanwhile, Ridley frets, throwing herself into research of unicorns derived from artwork from the middle ages — that art history degree that everyone mocked earlier in the film comes in awfully handy — deducing that capturing unicorns always goes hand in hand with massacres and violent retribution. Which means, lurking in the woods are the hulking parents of the adolescent unicorn, and they’re not about to live and let live.
It should be said that Death of a Unicorn‘s main conceit is nonsensical — not so much the unicorn stuff, but rather the entire notion that a teenaged daughter of a corporate lawyer would be forced to attend a business trip under the auspices of “how can we trust you to protect our company’s interests until we’ve met your sullen, perpetually vaping, undergrad daughter?” Not to put too fine a point on it but — in the interest of keeping things equine-centric — that’s utter horse shit, and it speaks to the film’s flimsy construction. Scharfman’s film could have used its fantastical scenario to explore grief and reconciliation between a father and daughter or it could use the same idea to interrogate the way industrialists would view the existence of genuine magic as an opportunity to further enrich themselves, but not both. As such, this feels like two competing, equally underbaked, ideas smooshed together with neither narrative thread given the space to develop or evolve in an unexpected direction. It’s an odd takeaway from a film where half a dozen people are gored to death by unicorns, but there isn’t a single unanticipated moment in Death of a Unicorn, particularly once one identifies the strain of over-the-top comedic violence that Scharfman favors.
After a while, it becomes easy to notice how often the actors are costumed in white blouses or lab coats — it makes all the blood stand out better, naturally — or how they’re typically framed in tight medium shots that would leave their vulnerable upper torsos exposed to a horn, puncturing them from off screen. In Cabin in the Woods’ kill-crazy finale, there’s an eight-second sequence of someone being impaled by a unicorn that perfectly captures the mix of whimsy, majesty, and horror that Death of a Unicorn is straining for; now, imagine a lesser version of that sequence repeated a dozen different times, only featuring more gloopy meat chunks and animated-looking cryptids. This is all executed with a maddening weightlessness to the film’s visual effects, the creatures never passing the eye test when inserted into the film’s blocking, lighting, and production design (the most eyebrow-raising credit here belongs to Zack Snyder’s longtime DP Larry Fong, who shot this film and who one would assume has a better feel for integrating VFX and practicals). And through it all, Death of a Unicorn keeps returning to well-trod gags, like volunteering the house’s staff for the most dangerous missions or Shepard going full galaxy brain after repeatedly doing rails of ground-up unicorn horn. There’s little cultural specificity to the portrayal of the Leopolds, which is perplexing considering how thoroughly the Sackler family, the societal scourges and owners of Purdue Pharma (and almost certainly the primary influence for these heavily fictionalized characters), have been publicly excoriated over the past few years. But perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is how utterly at sea Rudd is, unable to find a toehold as a comedic presence, servile factotum, or well-intentioned father struggling to connect with his heartbroken child. There’s really nothing to the role, and you can almost feel the actor disappearing into the background of scenes, happy to cede the spotlight to more demonstrative performers like Poulter and Grant.
Yet the single most damning thing one can say about Death of a Unicorn, a film where callous oligarchs and their private security force is disemboweled, have their chests caved in, and their skulls crushed like grapes, is that it’s plainly unmemorable and dull. You genuinely can’t prepare yourself for how much this would-be coarse comedy is spent debating the meaning of centuries-old tapestries. Even worse, the film is entirely divorced from the myriad justifiable reasons people hate the pharmaceutical industry — considering Elliot’s wife/Ridley’s mother died of prolonged illness, it’s a little baffling that the film can’t make any hay of that given the round-the-clock treatment Odell Leopold receives — so it leans on generic signifiers and faux pas: covetousness, dismissiveness, tone-deafness, etc. The sum total of effort here was coming up with a logline that lends itself well to viral marketing and coasting on anticipated audaciousness vapors. In other words, this year’s version of Cocaine Bear just dropped.
DIRECTOR: Alex Scharfman; CAST: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: March 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
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