Movie Review: Death of a Unicorn
The inciting incident of Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn is just that, the apparent death of a unicorn. En route to a weekend retreat at his boss’s cabin in the deepest part of the wilderness, Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortego) accidentally hit a unicorn with their car and seemingly put it out of its misery. Instead of leaving it on the road where they hit it, they pack the unicorn into the trunk of their car and bring it with them to the cabin, which happens to be a monstrous mansion overlooking the entire woods, where Elliot’s uber-rich but deathly ill boss Odell (Richard E. Grant), his wife Belina (Téa Leoni), their son Shepard (Will Poulter), and a few house workers are residing.
But what happens when you kill a unicorn? And what happens when a greedy family of seemingly endless money gets hold of the magical creature? In Scharfman’s world, there is a lot of humor, chaos, and gore. Scharfman expertly blends comedy, monster horror, and folk legend into Death of a Unicorn, going into the historical complexities of the mythical creatures to build tension and subvert our reality of how we perceive unicorns. Unicorns are normally associated with being nice, majestic, beautiful creatures but in Scharfman’s world, they are still majestic but also defensive, territorial creatures ready can kill anyone who disturbs their lively hood with their razor-sharp teeth or their legendary horn. It’s a stark difference from the glittery, rainbow-draped, My Little Pony unicorns we’ve come to know.
I found the family of Odell, Belina, and Shepard and all their house workers to be a blast, and wish the film focused solely on them and their experience with the unicorn. Grant, Leoni, and Poulter are perfectly cast as this super-rich family of idiots who care about nothing more than their money and power. While it seems like they have endless money and power, they want more, and finding the unicorn will take them to new levels. The “eat the rich” center of the film’s story is something we’ve seen a lot in recent years but with Grant, Leoni, and Poulter giving superb comedic performances while also seething with evil, it would have been very entertaining to watch their descent over their greed.
Unfortunately, Death of a Unicorn’s story focuses mostly on Elliot and Ridley, two uninspiring characters with an undercooker story. Rudd’s Elliot is a rehashed, dumber version of his socially awkward character from I Love You, Man and Ortega once again plays an angsty teen, something she seems to be type-casted as now (see also Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Wednesday). Elliot and Ridley have a strained relationship following the death of Elliot’s wife/Ridley’s mother and Elliot hopes that this weekend in the wilderness will bring them closer together. Rudd and Ortega have zero chemistry as a father and daughter which makes believing in their reconciliation story impossible. It also doesn’t help that Scharfman made Elliot and Ridley bland and uninteresting and every other character intriguing and funny.
Death of a Unicorn is inventive, bloody, and very funny with a slew of great supporting characters and performances. It’s just a shame the film’s main characters and so boring, which ultimately brings the film down from being a great horror-comedy to being a better-than-average one.
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