Nothing elicits an emotional response quite like a shock. Things hit harder when you haven’t had time to prepare for them — the funniest jokes, the saddest heartbreaks, the most infuriating revelations. It’s as true of real-life stories as it is of fictional ones. An emotional, stylistic, or narrative bump in the road isn’t just memorable, it’s affecting, and the best stories are both of those things. A shock, even a minor one, engenders investment from the audience, which is where the story acquires its value.
There’s one shock in Sally el Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd’s Unicorns, and it’s a serious one, too. Thus, it’s both memorable and affecting. The rest of the movie, alas, is neither, since there is only one shock. With the warm and fuzzy guise of the most milquetoast rom-com but the thematic concerns of a modern-day kitchen-sink drama, Unicorns is a trite, cloyingly sentimental, drearily predictable movie, its familiar premise developed through cliché after cliché until you can’t just anticipate the next scene, but the next several.
Luke (Ben Hardy) is a struggling single father and mechanic in London who unknowingly stumbles upon a drag show one night, where he witnesses a performance by Aysha (Jason Patel). Unaware of her true identity as Ashiq, he shares a kiss with her, then flees when he realizes he’s been mistaken. But Aysha needs a driver to escort her to and from her gigs, so when she later requests his services in return for a cut of her fee, he accepts, and an increasingly intense, interdependent friendship blossoms night by night.
There are obvious shades of The Crying Game here, obvious enough that one may suspect Unicorns was designed in part as a riposte to that movie’s loathsome treatment of its queer character; this movie is unabashedly and celebratorily queer, though in a comfortable, sanitized, almost idealistic way. Aysha’s flat is humble, but it’s lavishly decorated, far from the functional digs of most jobbing drag artists. Her bookings are private parties for the financial elites, and shows where punters chant her name and throw cash at her as though she were some international superstar (her actual performance ability is reasonable at best). Even Luke’s change of heart feels wishful — the movie doesn’t want to portray him as some homophobic boor, but his reaction to discovering Aysha’s identity demands, if only momentarily, that we regard him as just that, and his sheepishness around Aysha and her drag friends in subsequent scenes is absurdly overplayed. He may be a heterosexual mechanic from Essex, but this is the 2020s, and his startled cluelessness (and a brief moment of aggression) reads like a 1980s stereotype of this character.
But Unicorns functions largely to lead this character on a journey of self-discovery, which is where it goes most unpleasantly awry. Luke discovers new sides to himself, not just in his sexuality, but also tenderness, compassion, and generosity, and he does so through Aysha/Ashiq. First her money, then her joy and passion, and then her trauma, all serving to furnish him with a quasi-redemptive story arc. This is a movie whose heart only appears to be in the right place — its acceptance of its queer characters is rudimentary, at a bare minimum, while its exploitation of its queer, Brown-skinned lead for the personal development of its cishet, white lead exposes an ignorance to where its heart truly lies. It’s an ugly movie with a pretty face.
And it’s all just so predictable! Every character behaves precisely as expected, never deviating from what’s forecast for them from their introduction. Every interaction is resolved exactly as it must to keep the narrative on its extremely well-trodden path to a conclusion you could call 10 minutes in. That it takes two hours to get to this conclusion isn’t an issue, but that it feels like so much longer certainly is, and is equally certainly a symptom of how familiar nearly everything about Unicorns is. Only the aforementioned shock signals some hope for an alternative path, but it’s a false hope, and the movie swiftly falls back into its old rhythm. It’s wearying stuff, unbecoming of a filmmaker as sensitive as el Hosaini (this is the writing/directing debut of Floyd, who’s previously acted in two of her features), and unworthy of its audience.
DIRECTOR: Sally El Hosaini & James Krishna Floyd; CAST: Ben Hardy, Jason Patel, Hannah Onslow, Ravin J Ganatra; DISTRIBUTOR: Cohen Media Group; IN THEATERS: July 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
Comments are closed.