Eat-the-rich satires go back to the supposed dinosaur days of cinema, from Luis Buñuel to Jean Renoir, but they’re as in demand as ever thanks to the worlds, desperately populated by wealthy delusionals, created by Rian Johnson in his scalding and adored “Knives Out” movies. That many contemporary filmmakers are eager to jump on that tradition thanks to the latter films’ streaming (and no longer especially theatrical) success has led to results both punching and effective (“Ready or Not”) and severely undercooked (“The Menu”).
Enter Alex Scharfman’s “Death of a Unicorn” into that fray, an agonizingly unfunny send-up of big pharma and “Jurassic Park”-scale tentpoles that has none of the tooth or wit of any of the movies I just mentioned.
Here, en route to a weekend retreat in Canada to become proxy to a pharmaceutical billionaire (Richard E. Grant), the feckless Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his Gen Z, internet-warrior-pilled daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) accidentally hit and kill a unicorn with their rental car. But not before Ridley gets the chance to touch its psychedelia-inducing horn, and form psychically linked powers of her own to the mythical creature.
The unicorn’s radiance has the power to heal everything from Ridley’s teenage acne to Elliot’s poor-sightedness, which turns this unicorn into an inevitable potential cash cow for pharma CEO Odell Leopold, his pleated-short-wearing son Shepard (Will Poulter), and freshly blown-out wife Belina (Téa Leoni). This, and more, they learn upon arriving at the Leopolds’ many-acred estate, where company lawyer Elliot is negotiating to take a significant partnership in the enterprise because Odell is dying of terminal cancer.
But the unicorn population at large running about the wilds surrounding the Leopolds’ posh, secluded ranch compound is none too happy with the fact that one of their brood has now died by oligarchical hands. And so an uprising ensues where the rest of the unicorns attack and eliminate the Leopolds in grisly fashion, making for a confused mix of horror and comedy, ever a tricky knife’s edge (or unicorn’s tooth) upon which to dance. Writer/director Scharfman, whose feature directing debut teams him with, among other production companies, Ari Aster’s Square Peg, offers a potentially intriguing concept but one that only scratches the surface of unicorn lore, or the characters inhabiting this film, or the creature features this one wants to emulate.
Leoni seems to have fun in a jumpsuit and bumped-up hairdo, doting on her son Shepard, who’s recovering from drug addiction, as ever the prodigal children of rich parents with nothing better to do are. “Barry” breakout Anthony Carrigan gets the majority of the best laughs in the film, here playing a put-upon butler who, when asked to unlock the Leopolds’ gate during a moment of particular crisis, is told by Belina, “Years of service, and we’ve asked nothing of you!” But the upstairs-downstairs satire only goes about as deep as that, as the Leopolds get greedy about the unicorn’s potential to stop their patriarch’s cancer, its blood something they can perhaps peddle to the rich billionaires of the rest of the world for a sickness cure-all.
Ridley, traumatized by the cancer death of her mother and considered mostly a wastrel by those around her for pursuing a degree in the dread-inducing major of art history, knows a thing or two about the mythology behind these kindly rainbow-spewing creatures. If only anyone would listen to her! It becomes all too late once Shepard realizes that a fair-haired maiden such as Ridley could be the one to save them, and the unicorns encircle the Leopolds’ home and go in for a series of “Final Destination”-level kills.
It’s hard to tell if the shoddiness of the digital effects is intentional, serving to remind that this is a horror-comedy, not a horror movie. There is some hilarity to the kills, like when poor Dr. Bhatia (Sunita Mani) meets an unexpected fate. And perhaps, even, some satisfaction once the smugness of these people is wiped right off their faces and gutted from their insides. “Death of a Unicorn” doesn’t cheap out on intestines spilling out of bodies or sudden impailings that instantly obliterate people the movie has trained us to hate.
The lurching between genres, whether horror or comedy or heartfelt father-daughter movie, becomes increasingly transparent and frustrating as the movie tries to win our hearts back over with sentimental weepie moments in the film’s last act. The problem is we don’t really care who lives or dies, unless it’s, of course, these horrible rich people getting stabbed to death by unicorn horns.
The only entities this movie makes you feel for are its creatures, however unbelievably realized they are. Was that the film’s point? Scharfman may see humans as pitiful beings under a magnifying glass meant to be evaporated and punished for their hubris, but his point of view is far less clear.
Grade: C-
“Death of a Unicorn” premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival. A24 releases the film in theaters on Friday, March 28.
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