2025 | rated R | starring Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter Tea Leoni, Richard E Grant, Sunita Mani, Anthony Carrigan | written & directed by Alex Scharfman | 1 hr 47 min | 2 out of 5 stars |
2025 Halloween Horrorfest #5
Since the inspired inclusion of a unicorn galloping down the horror halls of a secret underground base in The Cabin in the Woods, it was inevitable that we would get a Killer Unicorn movie. It’s been realized in Death of a Unicorn, a feature debut for writer/director Alex Scharfman and an uneven horror/comedy more interested in beating home a message about big pharma greed than exploring the mythos of its titular characters.
Father and daughter, Elliott (Paul Rudd) and Ridley (Jenna Ortega) have been invited to his bosses’ vacation home where Elliott will make a pitch to be the family attorney and set he and his daughter up for life. Along the way they run over what is unambiguously a unicorn and, in the process, get covered with some of its magic blood. Arriving at the house, they attempt to keep the beast’s body hidden from patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant), wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and entrepreneurial son Shepard (Will Poulter) until its healing powers become apparent which causes a race against time where scientists attempt to extract the powers of the healing unicorn while its family shows up outside to reclaim their baby.
On paper, Death of a Unicorn sounds like a blast, but this is not a melding of material and filmmaker as Scharfman doesn’t quite yet have the chops to meld horror and comedy, creating a wildly uneven tonal balance that feels like it quickly got bored with its own premise. Before and between unicorn kill scenes there are long stretches of not particularly clever dialog that simply leans on how ruthlessly these rich people are going to slice and dice this animal for profit. That’s where Scharfman’s real heart lies. On the plus side, Will Poulter is particularly funny stand out here, chewing up the scenery as the son who turns out to be more ruthlessly ambitious than his father and is willing to get his hands dirty to do it. On the minus end, think about how dull a movie would have to be to suck the natural charm and charisma of Paul Rudd (and Jenna Ortega for that matter) out of the room and that’s exactly the feat this movie manages to pull off. Rudd can usually spin anything into gold and Ortega can spin it into silver, but both are completely bogged down here by an over-written under-developed story. You could swap them out with literally any other actor, which you can usually never do with a Paul Rudd movie.
Unicorn doesn’t seem to have either the budget or the creativity to explore its unicorn characters thoroughly, to play out their magic (what does it mean to be bonded with them the way Ortega is in the beginning) or their abilities as monsters. When they attack, they do so with bared jaws and twisted horns that rip people to shreds and pull out their intestines. It’s crazy, but the movie doesn’t lean on those beats to create a fun chase atmosphere, constantly stopping and starting the action for characters to sit around and talk about anything other than how to fight their way out of the situation. As a result, nobody here is particularly likable or villainous, just in the way of the potential fun that seems just around the corner the whole time.
I can’t help but feel like the movie would have played better more like the unicorn in Cabin in the Woods than turning them into gnarly beasts out of a heavy metal album cover. Like if they were actually magical – they flew, bled sparkles and rainbows and gored people with a happy little smile on their faces. That would have been more fun and creepier. Instead, these are monsters you could replace with werewolves or any other cryptic. “This Loch Ness monster has healing powers, let’s bottle and sell it!” A more clever movie would lean into the uniqueness of the monster and design kills off of that. Just imagine the Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright version of this during their Blood and Ice Cream hay day. That’s what I wanted.
The other frustrating element was the big pharma family plot itself. Under the Eat the Rich theme, the family plot to shave off the unicorn horn and immediately sell off one vial of it without coming up with some way to reproduce it seems like a ridiculously short-cited business model. How much money would you really make from this? A plan that doesn’t change when they learn there are more unicorns and the unicorns can heel themselves, which seems like it would change the model a whole hell of a lot. The movie goes even further by having the unicorn blood literally become a cancer cure – a universally good thing – and it is still treated as a threat to the unicorns instead of a legitimate moral dilemma to be had about the value of human vs animal life. And that is going on all the while the unicorns are easily murdering everyone in the estate and Ortega’s character is arguing that they are a great danger. Basically, this movie gives you every reason in the world the characters would want to kill these unicorns – both for their own survival and to cure cancer – and then argues that we just shouldn’t do it anyway.
Part of this movie seems to think it is presenting its unicorns like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. They are nature incarnate, not the villain, and need to be left alone otherwise we will be responsible for forcing them to lash out and defend themselves. The big difference is the unicorns sprung from nature itself where the dinosaurs were cloned by science and the unicorns are literally self-healing, self-replicating magic. It’s less a metaphor for an endangered species or a finite resource as it is a metaphor for finding a fountain of youth with an endless supply of magic water. When you introduce magic into the world, you’re whole attempted capitalist satire collapses under a lack of scarcity and the needlessness of fighting over resources.
All that could be forgiven if the movie were half as fun as it should have been, instead Death of a Unicorn is a slow, uneven slog that doesn’t know how to end and wastes the talents of its lead and a high-concept premise that it refuses to tackle more than skin deep. The thing about movies recycling this Eat the Rich theme is if you keep eating the rich, you’re just going to get fat. Which is a nice summary of Death of a Unicorn. It’s flabby, slow-moving and lazy.