Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alex Scharfman
Starring: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Richard E. Grant, Téa Leoni, Will Poulter, Anthony Carrigan, Sunita Mani,
Jessica Hynes, Steve Park
If you're an animal lover, there's an undeniable pleasure in seeing a
clip of a matador getting their just desserts as they mistime a movement
and end up getting gored by a bull. If you like seeing wronged creatures
run their sharp horns through the brittle bodies of human assholes, there
are briefly satisfying moments of such bloodletting in
Death of a Unicorn, but little else on offer.
Writer/director Alex Scharfman's satirical creature feature sees
Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play corporate lawyer Elliot
Kintner (that name presumably a nod to two Spielberg movies) and his
teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega). The latter is none too
happy when her dad forces here to tag along for a weekend at the home of
Elliot's boss, terminally ill billionaire Odell (Richard E. Grant).
As the pair bicker in the car on the way, Elliot takes his eyes off the
road and hits what initially appears to be a white horse. Upon closer
inspection it's only a bloody unicorn! When Ridley grasps the apparently
not-so-mythical creature's horn she experiences a trip that resembles the
climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it's interrupted when Elliot bashes the beast's head in with a tire
iron.
Believing the creature to be dead, Elliot loads it in the back of his SUV
and continues on to Odell's mansion. But there it comes to life, and noting
how Ridley's acne disappeared when splashed with its blood, Odell sees an
opportunity to use the creature to cure his cancer while making a fortune
from its healing powers. Things get messy when in the fashion of classic
monster movie Gorgo, bigger unicorns come looking for their baby.
Death of a Unicorn is very much a classic b-movie setup, one
that plays out in a single location like a 1940s poverty row production. But
such movies usually ran for less than 70 minutes and generally had no
ambitions beyond providing some cheap thrills. Scharfman isn't content with
mere monster movie entertainment; he believes he's making some insightful
satire, but his film has nothing more to say than "rich people are bad." His
rich people - along with Odell we get his trophy wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and his obnoxious son Shepard (Will Poulter) - are certainly bad,
but they're not very interesting. The dialogue is nowhere near as sharp and
witty as it needs to be for this sort of thing to work. Grant, Leoni and
Poulter try their best but fail to elevate their villains above stock
sociopaths. Rudd is similarly adrift as a character whose treatment of his
daughter makes him unlikeable for far too much of the film. Ortega has to
settle for yet another emo teen stereotype, sleepwalking through the
narrative.
Death of a Unicorn only comes alive when people start dying.
There's some brief fun when the angry unicorns arrive and start
disembowelling some awful people, but due to the bond that's established
early on between Ridley and the creatures, there's never any fear that the
one innocent party here might be in any danger.
Of course, there's a now obligatory "trauma" backstory, with Ridley having
lost her mother and Elliot seeming to throw himself into his work to avoid
facing their grief head-on. It all feels dishonest, as though Scharfman felt
obliged to add such an element in the hopes it might somehow elevate the
material. Death of a Unicorn is one of many movies that have
trod the same post-Get Out
path of sending an innocent character to a place where they're surrounded by
villainous rich narcissists, and the gimmick is really wearing thin at this
point. In failing to stand out from the contemporary horror-comedy crowd,
Death of a Unicorn is anything but a unicorn.
Death of a Unicorn is in UK/ROI
cinemas from April 4th.
